Wedding Vows: I Thee Wed. Shirley Jump

who’d all come in at once. It was a good five minutes before she had a second to return to Cade.

      He rehashed their conversation in his head, as if a replay could show him how to fine tune it next time, to get a different result.

      “Did you mean what you said about helping me get my loan?” she said when she came back.

      He nodded. “As much or as little as you want. I can even give you the money from our account.”

      She shook her head. “I want to do this alone.”

      “It’s our money, Mel.”

      “It’s your inheritance. I want to earn my own. I want this—” she indicated the shop “—to be mine.”

      “Okay. Whatever you want. You call all the shots, Melanie.”

      She hesitated so long, worry began to crowd onto Cade’s shoulders.

      Then she thrust out her hand. He took it, feeling the familiar delicate palm inside his much bigger one, knowing that if he inhaled the fragrance of her skin, he’d be swept back up into what could have been, instead of what really was.

      Instead he shook when she did, the businesslike stance feeling so odd, he wanted to laugh.

      “Then you have a deal, Cade Matthews.”

       CHAPTER FOUR

      “WHAT WAS I THINKING?” Melanie slumped into one of the bar stools beside Kelly Webber, a frequent customer turned good friend. The college crowd had begun petering out as night began to fall and discussion of dorm room parties replaced the complaints about professors with homework fetishes. Emmie was sitting at a table in the corner of the room, ostensibly doing her homework, but really chatting with a friend while their dueling laptops accessed Cuppa Life’s wireless Internet connection.

      Melanie let out a sigh. “Once again, I said yes when I should have said no.”

      “That’s called Momitis. It’s how I got roped into doing the PTL dinner and chairing the book drive all in the same week.” Kelly took a sip from her decaf iced mocha and gave Melanie a sympathetic smile. She had her dark brown hair back in a ponytail and wore a blue track suit, her usual running-the-kids attire. Her two sons were taking karate lessons at the studio three doors down, giving Kelly a moment for a coffee and friendship break. “Just skip the reunion. Who needs that one-upman-ship fest?”

      “But Cade needs my help.” Melanie sat back and blinked. “What am I saying? I’m not married to Cade anymore, or at least I won’t be soon. I shouldn’t care if he needs my help or not.”

      Kelly laid a hand over Melanie’s. “But you do.”

      A sigh slipped from her lips. “Yeah.”

      “What you have is a conundrum, my friend.”

      Melanie grinned. “You helping Peter study for his English tests again?” Kelly often used car time with her captive child audience to do test review.

      “Hey, it helps dispel my soccer mom image when I throw out a multisyllable word.” Kelly winked.

      “You’ll be ready for Jeopardy! before that boy graduates high school.” Melanie laughed, then sobered and returned to the subject she’d been avoiding. “I guess the real problem is that I don’t want to go to that reunion and tell everyone…” Her voice trailed off. She stirred at her coffee with a spoon, even though it was already fully sugared up.

      “Well, that I’m not what they expected me to be.”

      “What? You didn’t become what you imagined on graduation day?” Kelly clutched at her chest in mock horror. “Who does, Melanie? Heck, most of us have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. And a good chunk of us never do. Take my husband, for instance. He just bought an ATV. An ATV. We live in a subdivision, for Pete’s sake. Where’s he planning on riding it? Around the cul-de-sac?”

      Melanie laughed. “I thought he was sold on getting a jet ski.”

      “Apparently those are a little hard to use on the grass. The man forgets we live on eight acres in Indiana, not to mention an hour away from the closest thing to jet ski water.” Kelly threw up her hands in a “duh” gesture. “So now he’s hell-bent on saving for a lake house. I swear, that man has more toys than our ten-year-old.”

      Melanie fingered the spoon, then finally let it rest. “At my age, you’d think I’d be well adjusted enough that I wouldn’t worry about what people at the class reunion think of me. I mean, I’m a grown-up.”

      Kelly laughed. “Honey, even Miss America worries about what people will think of her at her reunion. I don’t know what it is about those things, but they always bring out our inner seventh-grader.”

      Melanie nodded in agreement, drew in a breath and held tight to the stoneware mug. “Cade said he’ll cosign on my loan if I help him at the reunion.”

      “A little quid pro quo?” Kelly grinned. “Sorry. That was on last week’s test.” Her gaze softened.

      “What does Cade want you to help him with?”

      “Networking at the reunion. Cade’s a master in the courtroom, but put him in the middle of a cocktail party and he’s totally out of his element. He gives new meaning to the words social faux pax.”

      Kelly chuckled, twirling the straw in her frozen mocha. “Do you think he asked you for this favor because he secretly wants to try to get the two of you back together?”

      Melanie glanced again at her daughter, and wondered about the glances she’d seen Emmie exchange with Cade. The good mood Emmie had been in this morning had lasted all day, clearly a sign something was up.

      Ha, like what Emmie was trying to cook up was the problem. Today, Melanie had found herself exchanging a few glances of her own with Cade. The year apart had only seemed to intensify her gut reaction to his presence, as if her hormones had been silently building, waiting for the trigger of Cade to set them off.

      Hormones could be kept under control. She wasn’t going to let a little desire send her running back into a marital mistake.

      “Even if he does,” Melanie said, “it’s not going to happen. I can’t go back to being the little wife.”

      “What if that’s not what Cade wants? What if he’s changed?”

      “If there’s one thing I know about Cade, it’s how much he likes things to stay exactly the same. He loved knowing I’d be there at the end of the day when he came in from work. He liked wearing his blue suit on Mondays, the gray onTuesdays. Eating spaghetti every Thursday night, like our lives were a stuck record.”

      “Surely you don’t think he wanted that at the expense of your dreams?”

      Melanie considered her friend’s comment for a moment, sipping her coffee. “I don’t think Cade ever set out to hurt me, to purposely stuff me in this little Stepford box. We stepped into these roles and then it got easier to go on playing them, rather than changing the game halfway through. He wanted a wife who would arrange the dinner parties, pack his suitcases, have his dinner waiting. He’s a good man, but a stickler for tradition.” Melanie rose and deposited her empty mug in the sink, then returned to Kelly, lowering her voice so Emmie wouldn’t overhear. “For Cade, sameness is security and we got into one heck of a secure rut. He needs something different from a marriage than I can give. I don’t want a man who loves me for my ability to cook a crown roast for twelve. Whether or not he looks good in a suit on the night of the reunion, I’m not falling back into that same trap and letting my emotions override my brain.”

      Like that hadn’t happened a hundred times already today. When Cade was in the shop, Melanie had been intensely aware of his every move. The scent of his cologne, the blue of his eyes, the very nearness