Carole Buck - Zoe And The Best Man

Who would have thought it? he asked himself, trying to focus on the blissfully oblivious couple whose first marital embrace was provoking an affectionate outpouring of laughter and applause from the gathered congregation. Who in the name of heaven would have imagined that the flat-chested, pixie-haired girl who’d demonstrated she had more guts than a lot of professional warriors would blossom into a champagne and sherbet beauty who looked as though the toughest task on her daily agenda was deciding what to wear?

Not he!

Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t thought about the sky-eyed Zoe Armitage now and again during the past decade and a half. Because he had. Memories of her courage had surfaced in his consciousness more times than he cared to count. Likewise, regrets that he’d never told her how brave she’d been or explained why he’d behaved so brutally.

About three years after their jungle ordeal, an impulse he still didn’t fully understand had prompted him to make a few discreet inquiries about Zoe’s situation. He’d learned that she was attending the University of Virginia. Her scholastic record was brilliant. Socially, she seemed remarkably settled for a young woman whose relentlessly nomadic parents—Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick, two of the world’s foremost anthropologists—’had never married, much less provided their only child with a permanent home.

Flynn had gathered this reassuring information at a distance, never seriously considering the possibility of making personal contact with Zoe. He supposed he might have acted differently if he’d felt the girl was in trouble. But since all indications had been that she was doing just fine—

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the minister suddenly intoned, derailing his train of thought. “Please welcome our newlyweds. For the first time, I give you Mr. and Mrs. Lucien Devereaux!”

There was another wave of applause as the wedding guests rose to their feet. While most of them were lit up with sunbeam smiles, more than a few were blinking back happy tears.

Flynn experienced a sharp pang of emotion as he watched Luc link hands with the ethereal, green-eyed redhead he’d vowed to love, come what may, for the rest of his life. He’d never seen his friend look so happy. So whole. So…at peace with himself.

His mind flashed back nearly twelve weeks to the night he’d confronted a drunken, despairing Lucien Devereaux across a small wooden table in a dingy French Quarter bar.

“Wallowing in self-pitying gloom” had been his sardonic diagnosis of his former comrade-in-arms’ condition. He’d intended the words to flick on the psychological raw and it had been plain to see that they had. In much the way he’d once prodded Luc into making his first parachute jump, he’d goaded his friend out of the emotional mire and gotten him talking about why he believed his relationship with Peachy was doomed.

Flynn had received an incredible earful, starting with an inebriated explanation of how the shock of an emergency landing during a flight back from a wedding in Atlanta—to wit, the realization that if the plane she was on had crashed, she might very well have died without ever having “done it"—had prompted Peachy to ask her landlord of two years to deflower her.

Luc had become increasingly lucid as he’d recounted how he’d initially resisted this lunatic proposal, then changed his mind and decided to pretend to accept the one-time-only offer in order to protect his temporarily traumatized tenant from her own impulses. He’d been nearly sober when he’d bitterly declared that it was his unruly impulses about which he should have been concerned.

“That first morning, I was thinking commitment,” Luc had confessed rawly. “Commitment, as in marriage. Commitment, as in making a home and having a family.” He’d given a humorless laugh. “You know my history. Can you honestly see me—me!—playing the loving husband and adoring daddy?”

“Playing?” Flynn had echoed. “No. Being? Yeah. Sure. No problem.”

His friend’s expression had gone stark with disbelief at that point. His response to this had been predicated on a conviction that had been growing within him for a number of years.

“You haven’t figured it out, have you?” he’d said.

“Figured out, what?”

“That if you really were the alienated son of a bitch you seem to think you are, you would have bedded your little virgin without a second thought and moved on. That you would’ve spent every dime of the money you’ve earned from your books on yourself instead of using a big chunk of it to bankroll the dreams of people like that high school buddy of yours who always wanted his own restaurant. And that you’d be holed up in solitary splendor in some Manhattan bachelor pad instead of landlording over an eccentric old apartment building that’s stocked with folks you’ve made into the family you never had.”

“I—”

“Think about it.” He’d shifted into his “Shut up, Soldier, and listen” mode without hesitation. While self-control had been something he’d had to work hard to develop, the knack of commanding other people had always come easily to him. “You’ve got a surrogate mother in Laila Martigny. A surrogate father in Francis Smythe. A pair of doting great-aunts in May and Winnie Barnes. So what if the dynamics are a little kinky? You care about the people back at Prytania Street. Deep down in that place you seem to think is so incapable of making a connection, you care about them. And they sure as hell care about you.”

He’d watched Luc absorb the words and slowly begin to. accept their meaning. Finally the younger man had asked, “What about Terry Bellehurst?”

Flynn had allowed himself a grin. “He’s a twofer. A big brother and a big sister.”

“And…Peachy?”

“I think you’ve known the answer to that since the day she walked into your life.”

He’d carted Luc back to Prytania Street shortly before dawn and dumped him on the couch in the living room of his apartment. Before he’d departed, he’d pledged to his friend that if— no, when— things worked out, he would stand up as the best man during the “I do’s.” Had he known then how complicated keeping his word was going to turn out to be—

“I’m glad you were able to make it, Mr. Flynn,” a dulcetly feminine voice said, suddenly bringing him back to the present.

The assertion came from his right. Wondering uneasily how long he’d been meandering down memory lane, Flynn turned to face its source—a classically pretty woman who’d been one of Peachy’s three bridal attendants. Dressed in blush pink silk, she had chestnut-colored hair and crystalline gray eyes. She was somewhere in her early thirties and she was very obviously expecting a child.

Some long-suppressed lesson in etiquette prompted him to offer the woman his arm. She accepted it with a charming smile and they started down the aisle behind the newlyweds. The other two bridesmaids—the May Winnies, vivacious in raspberry lace and pearls—brought up the rear.

“It’s just Flynn,” he corrected after a second or two. “And I apologize for holding up the proceedings, Mrs…”

“Powell,” she supplied, giving him a look he couldn’t interpret. He had the peculiar feeling that something about him had surprised her. That he wasn’t what she’d expected. Although why this woman would have expectations about him, he had no idea. “Eden Powell. I’m Peachy’s sister. And considering that Luc mentioned you probably had to risk life and limb to get here, I’m willing to cut you a little slack vis-a-vis your late arrival.”

The name Eden rang a bell somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind. Had he not been half-dead on his feet, he probably would have pursued the matter. He didn’t like loose ends.