Their Unfinished Business

It was a moment before Luke broke the awkward silence. “I did get my diploma, you know.”

She blinked in surprise as much at his words as at the quiet pride with which they were spoken. He’d dropped out of high school during his senior year, and although Ali was three years his junior and they hadn’t started to date until she was nearly a senior herself, his lack of a diploma had been the cause of more than a few arguments. She had urged him repeatedly to go back to night school or earn a general equivalency degree. He was too smart not to, she’d told him.

“I didn’t know,” she said. Then, “I’m glad.”

“I took adult education courses after I left. It didn’t take me very long.”

“What made you decide to do it?”

He shrugged and glanced away. “It was just after I’d made my first million with the dot-com I’d founded. I guess I didn’t want people to think I was a fluke or…stupid.”

“I never thought you were stupid.”

“No.” The grin was back in a flash of white teeth. “You just thought I was reckless and impulsive. I still am, by the way.”

And because the grin had sent a shower of sparks through her system, she retorted crisply, “I can tell. You’re driving that damned Harley without a helmet. That’s illegal, you know.”

“Not in every state. Besides, you can’t get the full experience with a bucket strapped to your head.” A pair of dark brows rose over the top rim of the sunglasses. “Want to go for a ride, Ali? I can go real slow if you’d like, or take you fast.”

His silky tone and the double entendre implied along with his raised brows had gooseflesh appearing on her arms.

“Fast or slow, I never liked your bike,” she answered primly.

“No. But you used to like me.”

What she’d felt had gone a great deal beyond “like,” and he damned well knew it. Ali notched up her chin and let the chill seep into her inflection when she said, “So, what are you doing all the way out here today?”

She asked, but she thought she knew. Surely he had driven to this secluded shore of the island to speak with her in private before the midweek meeting at which Dane and Audra would be present. An apology would be coming any minute…an apology she still planned to decline.

Ali’s stone cottage, which had once belonged to her grandmother, sat on Trillium’s western shore, affording it a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan. It was tucked in amid a huge parcel of state land, making it the only private residence for miles. The only private residence except for…

Even before she could finish the thought, Luke was pointing to the slight rise at the northern edge of her property. Since the leaves on the trees were still sparse, Ali could just make out the pitch of the neighboring cottage’s roof and she cursed her hubris.

The place had belonged to Luke’s grandmother. Elsie Banning had raised Luke after his father, an alcoholic, had died while Luke was still in grade school. Luke’s mother had already abandoned the family by then. As Elsie’s only surviving kin, the cottage and the seven wooded acres on which it sat technically belonged to Luke.

“I thought I’d swing by the old house and see how it’s fared since I’ve been gone.” He took off his sunglasses again and fiddled with the ear pieces. Regret colored his tone when he added, “I should have had someone taking care of it over the years.”

Elsie had died just three months before he’d left Trillium. If the man had one redeeming trait, Ali knew it was that he’d loved his grandmother without reserve. Her death had devastated him.

“I’ve looked in on it from time to time,” she admitted.

She’d done more than that, actually. She’d kept the grass mowed, the carpet roses trimmed back and the cobblestone path that led from the driveway to the front door free of weeds. She’d done it for Elsie, not for Luke, or at least that’s what she’d told herself. But sometimes, after finishing the yard work, she would sit on the rear porch that faced the big lake, rock slowly back and forth in the wide swing where she and Luke had long ago shared their first taste of passion, and wonder what he was doing and if he ever thought about her.

The fact that he’d run into her today by accident seemed to answer that question now.

“I appreciate it,” he said.

“It’s no trouble to walk over,” she replied on a shrug.

Luke motioned toward the house behind her. “Does that mean you live here now?”

She nodded. “My grandmother deeded it to me when she moved to Florida with my parents six years ago.”

He smiled slowly and despite Ali’s closed posture, laid one warm hand on her upper arm and squeezed. The casual contact caused her traitorous pulse to shoot off like a bottle rocket and had her irritated all over again. He seemed not to notice, lost as he was in reminiscing.

“I think I spent as much time in your grandmother’s kitchen as I did in my own. She made the best sugar cookies on Trillium. Remember how when we were kids we would sneak them off the baking tray before they even had a chance to cool?”

Ali didn’t want to be reminded of the ways in which their lives had once twined together so sweetly since his abandonment had caused her heart to fray apart afterward. And so when he asked, “How is Mrs. Conlan doing these days?” she announced baldly, “She died last winter.”

“God. I’m sorry.” He slipped the glasses back on, making Ali wonder if she had just imagined that fleeting shadow of what had looked like self-reproach. “I didn’t know.”

“How would you?”

“Ali.” He said her name quietly, and then stroked her cheek. This time she didn’t back away, if only to prove to herself that his touch meant nothing.

A bee buzzed past and overhead a blue jay’s shrill cry rent the silence as they regarded one another.

Finally, motioning in the direction of his grandmother’s property, Ali said, “Don’t let me keep you, Luke. I know you’re a busy and important man.”

He hesitated, and she thought for a moment he was going to say something, but then he dropped his hand and straddled the bike, firing it to life with a swift downward kick of his booted foot. Over the engine’s throaty growl he hollered, “See you Wednesday.”

Wednesday, Ali knew, would come much too soon.

Luke slowed the bike as he approached the driveway to his grandmother’s cottage, but in the end, he sped past it, instead following the rutted road as it wound through the woods and then spilled back onto the main drag a dozen miles later.

He hadn’t felt up to seeing the cottage and confronting any more of his past. Not after seeing Ali.

He’d known her right away. She hadn’t changed much. Even the baseball cap snugged over her crown was the same. He snorted out a laugh that was lost to the wind. The woman just couldn’t give up on the Detroit Tigers even though they hadn’t won a World Series since 1984.

Despite her poor taste in baseball teams, she looked good. Better than good, actually, even with her dark hair sprouting from the back of the cap, perspiration dotting her upper lip and dirt streaking her right cheek. Her eyes were still a couple shades darker than caramel and she’d kept her figure, that long-legged, slim-hipped athletic build that had given him many a sleepless night in his youth.

He frowned, realizing that none of the women he’d dated during the past decade had looked anything like her. There had been blondes and redheads, but not a single brunette. Certainly none of those women had been a fan of baseball much less able to pitch one low and inside while the bases were loaded in the bottom of the ninth.

That had been only one of Ali’s talents, of course. Remembering the others nearly had him crashing his bike into the unforgiving trunk of a sugar maple.

He’d thought he’d forgotten her. No, that wasn’t true. He’d never forgotten her. But over the years he’d convinced himself that adolescence and inexperience had magnified and romanticized the feelings he’d once had for her. In a way, she’d been the girl next door, since their grandmothers had lived side by side. He and Ali had always known one another and hung around together since Luke and her older brother, Dane, had been good friends.

Then, the summer she was seventeen, the pigtails he’d once pulled had become the sleek tumble of hair he’d weaved his fingers through. God, he still remembered the magic of that first kiss and the way her slim arms had wrapped around him and held tight when he would have backed away. He’d been twenty at the time and Luke had known that everyone on the island, including her family, thought their match was a mistake.

Looking back now, he didn’t blame them. He’d had no prospects at all, just big dreams as he’d pumped gas for the luxury cabin cruisers that stopped at Whitey’s Marina. Ali, on the other hand, was set to graduate top in her class and had plans to go away for her degree after completing a couple years at the community college on the mainland to save money.

He’d always figured his leaving had been as much a favor to her as a way out for him. Despite being accepted at the University of Michigan a few hours’ drive downstate, she’d begun to talk about staying on Trillium, taking correspondence courses or transferring to a less prestigious university near Traverse City and commuting a couple days of the week. Both of their futures had seemed so doomed.

Then his grandmother had died.

Luke could still hear the words Elsie Banning had spoken to him as she lay in a hospital bed, hooked up to an assortment of beeping, buzzing machines.

She’d gripped his hand with her knobby fingers and in a voice barely above a whisper she’d commanded, “Be happy, Luke, and make me proud. You’re not your father. It breaks my heart to see you settle for being less than what you were meant to be.”