Wedding Vows: I Thee Wed: Back to Mr & Mrs / Reunited: Marriage in a Million / Marrying Her Billionaire Boss

Another smile from her, the kind that could disrupt a man’s best intentions. “And I told him the medicine had some kind of mental side effects.”

“All that mattered was that he bought it and signed the firm as his personal counsel. You made that save, Mellie.” He leaned forward, careful not to invade her personal space, to keep it casual, to act as if his heart didn’t still trip over itself every time she smiled.

“That’s why I need you with me at the reunion. You make me look good.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Her glance flitted away. She reached for her coffee, her hand a nervous flutter that nearly toppled the cup. It clattered against the table, then settled into place.

“I’m serious. Your talent is people. Making them feel comfortable, welcome.” He glanced around the corner of their little nook, into the main part of Cuppa Life. The cozy coffee shop was beginning to fill with chattering college students, clustering around the tables and doing homework, playing cards, or just talking. It was the polar opposite to the stuffy, serious law offices of Fitzsimmons, Matthews and Lloyd. For a minute, he wondered what it was like to work in a place like this. To escape the daily grind of a job that had never felt quite right, as if all these years he’d been wearing the wrong size suit.

“This place is ‘Cheers’ with caffeine.”

She laughed. “Not quite as successful, but, yeah, I guess it does have that kind of atmosphere. Speaking of which, I better get back and help Emmie with the afternoon rush.” She rose and turned to go.

Cade reached for her arm. Everything within him begged for more contact, more of her. With reluctance he held back, tempered his touch to border on acquaintance, not spouse. “Melanie, go with me. Please.”

She paused, her emerald gaze meeting his for a long, silent second. “Are you really moving to Chicago?”

Once again, the belt tightened around his heart. If this didn’t work, there was no way Cade could stay in that house another second. “Yeah.”

Emmie shouted to her mother that she needed help making something called a “Frazzle.” With an apology, Melanie hurried back to the counter.

In a blur of activity, Melanie dumped a slew of ingredients into a blender and whirred the icy concoction together. She poured the frothy liquid into a cup, handed it to the customer, then set to work on a couple of lattes, filling the orders of the group of twenty-somethings 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 (#ulink_14624ee0-a272-5271-a6f5-7ab1df627c7d)

“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?”