Wedding Vows: I Thee Wed. Shirley Jump
other in the tight space with ease. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Cade had been here forever.
“You did great,” Melanie said after the last customers had been served and the door stopped opening. The sun was beginning its late afternoon descent, telling her it was nearly closing time.
“Thanks.” He leaned back against the counter and took a long drink of ice water. “I’m not used to moving so much, though. Guess all those years behind a desk are catching up to me.”
Cade was still trim, a man who worked out three mornings a week, rising at four to fit in a trip to the gym before work. He’d kept the same routine all of their married life, jogging in those early days when they couldn’t afford a gym membership. She bit her lip instead of telling him he looked as refreshed as the minute he’d stepped in the shop today, as he had the day she’d met him. As sexy as the day he’d told her he loved her. The day he’d asked her to marry him.
“How long until the next rush?”
Melanie glanced at her watch and for a second couldn’t read the numbers. She redoubled her focus.
“Anytime now. It won’t be long before the study groups and coffee dates head in.”
“I never thought this would be such a busy place,” he said.
“Yeah.” Melanie didn’t add anything more. There was no sense in reopening an old wound.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have supported you when you said you wanted to open this place.”
Melanie stared at Cade, stunned into silence. The man who rarely admitted fault, had just apologized? And over the last straw, the one that had made Melanie finally realize she was being suffocated by her marriage?
Enough avoiding the subject, Melanie decided. “Are you trying to convince me we should get back together? Is that why you’re working here? Why you apologized?”
He gave her a grin she could have drawn in her sleep. “Would that be so bad?”
“Yes, Cade, it would be.” She lowered her voice, then waited until the final customer had left the shop before continuing. “It’s over between us. Don’t read anything into this—” she gestured toward him and the coffeemaking “—or my attending the reunion. We made a deal, plain and simple.”
“That’s all it is? A deal?” He took a step closer, invading her space, once again making her nerves hypersensitive. “Nothing more, Mellie? If so, then I have a deal for you. A very different kind of deal.”
Heat and desire wrapped around his words, awakening senses that had been tamped down for so long. Kiss him, her body urged. Kiss him.
She wanted to, oh how she wanted to. She wanted to pretend the words had never been said, the hurts never inflicted, and that she and Cade could go back to that fairy tale from high school.
She reached out a hand, craving the feel of his cheek beneath her palm, the hard line of his jaw softened by freshly shaven skin. She inhaled, and with that breath, brought in the scent of Cade, a mixture of woods and mint, the same scents that had filled their shared bathroom for a thousand mornings.
She turned away, and started prattling on about the difference between a cappuccino and a latte. If she talked long enough, maybe her mouth could overrun the pounding drumbeat in her pulse.
Drums pounded in his head, an insistent rhythm of want, beating along with the soft jazz coming from the sound system. For a second, Cade thought he had read the same need in Melanie’s eyes.
If he bent down and kissed her, would she respond in kind? Melt into his arms, her lips soft and sweet beneath his?
Before he could find out, she’d turned away and started a coffee demonstration that Cade didn’t hear. Every sense had been attuned to her, and it was a long time until his brain stopped picturing her in his arms and his bed.
Cade had what he wanted—an uninterrupted block of time with Melanie. Now he just had to figure out what the hell to do with it.
He’d already screwed up his marriage once—he wasn’t one of those men who planted blame squarely on the wife, there had definitely been moments when he hadn’t been the best husband—and he had no intentions of doing it a second time, assuming he could figure out what he’d done wrong.
As he listened to her run down a laundry list of ingredients for a Frazzle, his mind reached back over the past years, but he didn’t find one place he could point to as the fault line. Sure, there’d been arguments. Moments when neither of them was especially happy, but no one event that glared back at him, an arrow pointing to the big mistake, saying “fix me and all will be as it was.”
His marriage had dissolved gradually, like threads in a blanket that came undone a little more each time you placed it on your lap. At night, he paced the living room of the house where he and Melanie had once lived—happily, he’d thought—and found no clues in the beige wall-to-wall carpet and soft sage walls.
He’d played that mental game a thousand times since she’d left and never come any closer to finding the solution than wondering if maybe he’d worked too much, been too unavailable to her. He was willing to be available now—and had told her so that night she left—but Melanie had still shut the door and drove away.
Even now, she was shutting him out, except this time she had a cappuccino machine between them, as if holding him at bay with a little steam.
They worked together for a few more hours, the day passing quickly. Before he knew it, Melanie was locking the door and counting the money in the cash register. “We’re done already?” he asked.
She nodded. “I close early on Sundays. There’s not enough business to justify staying open as late today as I do on the weeknights. During the week, we have the business people and the college students, but on the weekends, the businesses are closed and the students are more often out on dates than here.”
Cade glanced at his watch. “It’s early.” He paused, then figured he needed to bite this bullet someday. “Are the students the only ones with a date?”
“Me?” she looked surprised, then laughed. “No. I wouldn’t have the time or the energy even if someone had asked me out.”
No man had asked her out. She was spending her nights alone. Cade figured all the men in Lawford had to be either blind or brain dead to not want Melanie.
“Then how about dinner?” he asked, the words leaving his lips before he could think about the wisdom of the question. “With me.”
“Oh, Cade, I really don’t think—”
“It’s dinner, Melanie. Two chairs, a table and a meal. No hidden strings. No innuendo.”
Exhaustion had shaded the area below her eyes. No wonder, too, given the hyperspeed she worked at. He wanted to scoop her up, take her home and tuck her into their queen-size bed, letting her sleep until those shadows disappeared and the smile on her face became brighter, more like the Melanie he used to know.
“You need to eat,” he said softly.
“No, I need to get home.”
“To what?” Cade took a step closer. “To an empty house? An empty fridge?” Two things he was far too familiar with. “Have dinner with me, Melanie, for old times’ sake. Not because you’re my wife or because it might lead to something else. Hell, just go because you’re hungry and I’m offering a free steak.”
“Cade, we’re getting—”
“You don’t need to remind me every five minutes of the divorce,” he said, lashing out, unable to hear that word one more time today. “I know where we’re heading. I may not like it, but I’ve accepted the inevitable.”
She took a step closer, her chin upturned, her green eyes afire. “Have you?”
Hell