But by the end of her workday he was still on her mind and the fact that she hadn’t been with him since Saturday evening felt to her like an eternity.
Then, minutes from closing up the store, she looked out her front window and caught sight of a truck going by. Driven by Cade.
Okay, so it was totally ridiculous and uncalled for that she ran around her checkout counter and craned to watch the truck turn the corner and pull into the small four-space parking lot behind the store.
But that’s what she did. Excitement ran through her like a sudden chill. Her eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on her—it really was Cade behind that wheel.
Her very next thought was that she’d been working all day and she had no idea how she looked.
So she ran like a rabbit for the bathroom she shared with Holly.
In the mirror above the sink she saw that her hair was a tad flat, but her mascara and blush were okay. Her jeans were paint-free. She hadn’t put on the gray shirt she was wearing over a white tank top until after she’d finished painting Cade’s wall, so that was clean and continued to be wrinkle-free.
If only she could get to her purse and run a brush through her hair and put on some lip gloss...
Another dash took her out of the bathroom and behind her counter again. Keeping an eye on the front of her store to make sure there was no sign of Cade yet, she unlocked the cupboard where she stowed her purse, whipped it out and nearly threw things from inside of it in her search for her hairbrush and lip gloss. Finally finding them, she used both in a hurry, telling herself the whole time that she was acting like some kind of crazed teenager.
Popping a mint into her mouth and jamming her purse back into its cubby, she straightened up from behind the counter just in time to find Cade coming in her front door. He was wielding a dolly with his grandmother’s hope chest strapped to it.
“Good, I made it before you closed!” he said as he pushed open the door with that oh-so-fine rear end of his and rolled the dolly into the store.
“Let me help you,” Nati said, realizing only belatedly that she should have at least opened the door for him.
He wheeled the chest into the center of the shop and set the dolly upright, keeping it steady with one hand. He turned to smile at her as if he just might be as happy to see her as she was to see him.
“Hi,” he finally said.
“Hi,” Nati responded, attempting but failing to contain the grin she could feel on her face.
“I told you I’d get this thing to you,” he said. “I probably should have called to say I was coming but I got busy. Then there was a lot of traffic and I accidentally left my cell phone in my car when I switched to the truck at GiGi’s, so I still couldn’t call. I was afraid I’d get here and find you gone for the day.”
“Another ten minutes and you would have.”
“I’m glad it didn’t take another ten minutes, then. Where do you want it?” he asked with a nod at the hope chest.
“I have a workroom in back,” Nati answered, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb.
“Lead the way.”
She did, ordering herself to calm down, reminding herself that this was only business.
She opened the door for him to go through and said, “Just set it in the middle of the room.”
Cade maneuvered the dolly between worktables cluttered with other projects in various stages of completion. He put the hope chest where she’d told him to and unstrapped it from the dolly.
“There you go—she’s all yours,” he announced.
“Thanks for playing delivery boy.”
“Want to hire me?” he joked.
“Are you looking for new employment?” she countered.
“You never know...”
They both laughed at the absurdity of that.
“The wall looks good—I went home at lunch and saw it. I thought I might catch you but you’d been there and gone.”
“That’s just the base color, it will get darker as I go along—in case you’re worried. I know it looks a little bright at this stage.”
“I trust you,” he said.
Now what? Nati wondered. He’d brought the hope chest, they’d talked about the progress on the wall, he’d probably just leave.
But she so didn’t want that!
So she said, “How was Sunday dinner with the family yesterday?”
“Same as all the Sunday dinners—good. That’s what keeps us coming back,” he joked again. “How was your dinner with your grandfather?”
“That was good, too. I always like spending time with him.”
“What about tonight? You have plans?” Cade asked, as smoothly as if they were old friends.
“No...” Nati said tentatively, unsure why he was asking.
“I skipped lunch to go home to see you—and wasn’t smart enough to fix myself something to eat while I was there. So I’m starving. How’s that little grill pub across the street?”
Nati’s shop was among the six blocks of suburban Arden’s historic buildings that had been remodeled in an attempt to gentrify the area. After years of deterioration that had left the neighborhood with nothing but vacant storefronts and antique shops that were more like dumping grounds for garage-sale rejects, it was getting a new life.
The update had brought in many small businesses and new restaurants that were all doing their best to promote and support each other.
“They serve fantastic burgers and the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten. And their sticky chocolate-toffee pudding is too fantastic to pass up for dessert.”
“Then I don’t think we should.”
“We?” Nati echoed.
“I hate eating alone. And if you don’t have plans, why don’t you let me buy you dinner? And sticky chocolate-toffee pudding for dessert.”
Of course she shouldn’t say yes, Nati knew that. She’d spent two days fighting against the attraction she had for this guy by reminding herself of all the reasons he was well-dressed poison to her, and of the fact that she was only six months out of her marriage and was barely getting her head above water again anyway.
And yet no was not what she heard come out of her mouth....
“I guess I could keep you company.”
Cade’s grin got even bigger. “Music to my ears,” he said. “You do whatever you have to do to close up. I’ll put Louie’s dolly in the truck and meet you back here.”
Nati only had to turn off lights to finish closing up but she used a few minutes to try to get herself under control. To put things into perspective.
Dinner. You can have dinner with him, but that’s it, she told herself. And you’d better spend the whole time finding things wrong with him. For a change.
With that goal in mind, Nati took her purse, turned off the lights and met Cade out front.
Reprimanding herself along the way for how excited she was to be spending the next hour or so with him...
* * *
“Tell me about this grandfather of yours,” Cade suggested after they’d ordered—a hamburger for him, fish and chips for Nati. “GiGi seems to think pretty highly of him—she says he’s a wonderful man...”
“My grandfather is terrific. He loves life, he’s always cheery, he’s generous and kind and sweet and—”
“A little like his granddaughter?” Cade muttered with a small smile.
“I wish I was more like my grandfather—I adore him,” Nati said, pretending not to hear the compliment in Cade’s words even though it pleased her to no end.
“The more my grandmother talks about him, the more I think she might have felt that way about him, too,” Cade said.
“Until your grandfather happened along?”
“That makes it sound like my grandfather stole her away from y
ours, but if I’ve got the timeline right, GiGi and your grandfather had split up before my grandfather even met her.”
Did he also know that Jonah had dumped GiGi?
Nati thought it was better not to venture into that territory. “Hard to know what all went on so many years ago,” Nati said softly.
“How did your grandfather meet your grandmother...?” Cade asked, just as their food arrived.
“You want the whole family history?” Nati asked with a laugh.
“Sure.”
And he actually seemed interested.
But she also knew from experience that her humble beginnings could be a big turn-off for rich boys like Cade. Which might be a good thing if she wanted to keep her distance. So she said, “My grandfather met my grandmother here, in Denver. About five years after his family moved from Northbridge. He was a housepainter by profession and she worked in a hardware store selling paint.”
“Very romantic,” Cade teased. “And they had how many kids?”
“Just my father.”
“One kid? That’s unheard of in my family,” he joked. “Was that because they only wanted one kid or because they couldn’t afford more or...?”
“More just didn’t happen,” Nati said, repeating what her grandmother had always told her.
“And from one son came you.”
“Also an only child,” Nati confirmed.
His eyebrows arched over those blue, blue eyes as he ate a bite of burger.
Then he said, “You’re from a small family. Was that how your parents wanted it or was it another act of nature or was it economics...?”
“Economics?” Nati repeated.
“What does your dad do for a living?” Cade persisted.
Nati drenched a morsel of fried cod in vinegar and salt, ate it and then said, “My dad doesn’t do anything for a living now because he isn’t living—he and my mother were killed in a highway accident when I was thirteen.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No reason that you would have,” Nati said before she went on to answer Cade’s question about what her father had done for a living. “Both of my parents had a lot of jobs until I was four—nothing worked out for them, they hated nine-to-five, weren’t good at taking orders. Then they discovered big-rig truck driving.”
Cade’s eyebrows went up slightly again. Nati had expected more than that but decided he was just too polite to respond with the same level of horror that her in-laws had.
“That’s right, both my mother and my father were truckers,” she said, watching to see if that could drain the color out of his face the way it had blanched it from her mother-in-law’s when she’d heard it.
Cade ate a couple of French fries before he said, “Truck driving is an honest living. Did your parents like doing it?”
“It was a way of making money. The two of them were restless spirits who found each other and then found a way to make a living out of that restlessness.”
“Do you think things would have turned out differently if your family had stayed in Northbridge? My grandmother said they owned a farm there—do you think your father would have been happier working outside?”
It suddenly occurred to Nati that Cade knew what his great-grandfather had done to her family. And if he knew, then didn’t that mean that his grandmother knew? Maybe Georgianna Camden didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, this conversation suddenly gave her the sense that he might be carrying around some sort of guilt or shame, or at the very least that he didn’t approve of what his great-grandfather had done and was looking for reassurance of some kind.
Nati had no idea why she had that feeling. And even though she was curious about it, the history between their families didn’t seem like something to get into. Especially not with a client.
And to her, Cade was only a client, she reminded herself.
Even if he was also mouth-wateringly good-looking and extremely pleasant company. Even if he did make the woman in her more aware of his pure masculinity than she wanted to be. Even if this whole thing did seem like a nice dinner date and she couldn’t for the life of her find anything at all wrong with Cade...
After thinking a moment, she answered his question about her father.
“I guess he might have liked working in the open air. Having to sit behind a desk, going to meetings he thought were stupid, having a boss standing behind him cracking the whip—those are the things he hated about his jobs before he became a trucker. But my parents loved the open road, seeing different places, not being tied down, so I can’t really say if they would have been happy as farmers. And they probably wouldn’t have met at all if the family had stayed in Northbridge. My mom was from Denver. Actually, now that I think about it, so was my grandmother, so she and my grandfather wouldn’t have met, either—the whole course of things would have been different.”
“But ultimately you think that truck driving worked out for your parents?” Cade asked as if he wanted to believe that.
“As well as anything.”
“And what about you? Were you raised on the road?”
“I was essentially raised by my grandparents,” Nati said as she finished her fish, ate one more fry and then pushed her plate away.
“Like me, except your parents were still alive?” he asked, finishing his meal, too, and motioning to their waitress that they were ready for dessert.
“My mother was seven years younger than my father. She was only nineteen when I was born,” Nati explained. “She and my father were married, but motherhood? That wasn’t for her. With all the job changes and income instability, my father hadn’t ever moved out of my grandparents’ place, then he married my mother and moved her in, too. So that’s where they brought me home to when I was born and that’s still where we were living when my parents took up over-the-road truck driving as a team.”
“And left you with your grandparents?”
“I’d go with my parents occasionally but not for really long hauls. If it was a short run and I was on vacation from school, sometimes they’d take me, but not too often. Everyone agreed that a child should have stability and being at home with my grandparents provided that.”
“How did you feel about that?”
The sticky chocolate-toffee pudding they’d agreed to share arrived with two spoons. The waitress removed their dinner plates and set it in the middle of the table. When she left, Cade and Nati leaned closer toward each other—and the pudding—to taste it.
Cade took a deep breath, closed his glorious blue eyes and groaned his pleasure after his first bite of the warm chocolate pudding sodden with caramel sauce.
And Nati’s mind went somewhere it definitely shouldn’t have gone when she wondered if there were other things that elicited a similar response from him.
She took a drink of water to cool off, then tried to distract herself by focusing on the conversation.
“There were times before my parents died that I resented that they weren’t there for me,” she admitted. “But I loved being with my grandparents. They gave me a good life—spoiled me rotten, to tell you the truth. And it was just the way things were. I guess in some ways it was probably easier on me when my mom and dad died than it was on you because I didn’t have to leave my home and go somewhere different to live, with people I wasn’t already used to living with. I suffered the loss, but not much of a change in my day-to-day routine.”
“I can’t imagine that it was much easier,” Cade said. “For any of you. Your grandfather probably thought that if you’d all still been in Northbridge on the farm that he might not have lost his only son....”
That thought seemed to trouble Cade but their discussion was cut short when the waitress came to their table and told them that Monday was early-closing night an
d she needed to settle their bill.
Cade paid with a credit card, denying Nati’s offer to pay her own way or even to leave the tip.
They’d finished the pudding by the time the waitress came back with Cade’s card and receipt, so they left the restaurant to walk the short distance back to Nati’s store. She paused by the door rather than going to the parking lot with him.
“I want to take a look at the hope chest,” she said in explanation. “I can probably do some sketches of the design and some color samples to make sure that the restoration isn’t brighter or louder than your grandmother may want it. Then you can show it all to her for her approval before I get to work.”
“Will you be at the house tomorrow?”
“In the afternoon—I’m watching Holly’s shop in the morning, then she’s trading places with me at noon. If I finish the sketches and samples tonight I’ll bring them with me and leave them on your dining room table.”
“But you know, you don’t have to work nights to get it done—there really isn’t any hurry.”
“I know. But I like the peace and quiet, and I’m always anxious to get a new project started.” And she was too wound up after being with him—and certainly not finding anything wrong with him—to merely go home. So she thought that she might as well put some of that pent-up energy to good use.
Cade nodded, clearly accepting what she said at face value and having no idea what was behind it. But he didn’t move to leave, remaining there on the sidewalk outside of her shop, looking at her as if he needed to memorize her features.
Then he said, “This was nice—thanks for going with me and saving me from dinner alone.”
“Sure. Thanks for buying dinner,” Nati responded.
He continued to study her.
Nati wasn’t sure what he was doing, why he didn’t say good-night and go.
Then he reached for her upper arm in a friendly sort of gesture, and said, “Sometimes it’s funny how hard it is to just have a meal and some conversation that you really enjoy.”
And he leaned forward and kissed her temple.
Nati was so distracted by the glittery sensation of having his hand on her arm that she completely missed the approach of the kiss.
Corner-Office Courtship Page 7