Brenda Harlen - The New Girl In Town

“Oh,” he said, as he absorbed this second unexpected—but more welcome—revelation. And then he felt like a heel, because he was relieved to know that her marriage had fallen apart so that he didn’t need to feel guilty for fantasizing about a married woman.

“We’re just waiting for the final papers to come through,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry,” he said lamely.

She shrugged. “It happens.”

Yeah, he knew that it did. He also knew that a break-up was never as easy as she implied, even if it was the right choice.

“How long were you married?” he asked.

“Almost nine years.”

He stared at the woman who didn’t look like she was twenty-five. “Did you get married while you were still in high school?”

She smiled at that. “Fresh out of college.”

“How old were you when you went to college?”

“I’m twenty-nine,” she told him.

And he was thirty-seven—which meant there weren’t as many years between them as he’d originally suspected, but there was still the barrier of her marriage. And even if her divorce papers came through tomorrow, she was obviously still hung up on her husband. Her evident distress over his phone call was proof of that.

“What did your soon-to-be-ex-husband want?” he asked. “Did you take off with his coffeemaker or something like that?”

“No, nothing like that. We actually had a very civilized settlement.”

“Then why was he calling you now?”

“He heard from a friend of mine that I bought a house and wanted to tell me he thought it was a mistake.”

“Did you tell him it was none of his business?”

“Yes,” she said. “But after nine years of marriage—and not just living together, but working together, too—some habits are hard to break.”

“Is he a photographer, too?”

“No. He’s the senior fashion editor at Images.”

“Is that why you left Manhattan?”

She shook her head. “It’s a big enough city that I could have stayed, found a new apartment, a new job, and probably have never seen him again if I didn’t want to. But everything just seemed so inexplicably woven together there. I needed to get away from all of it, to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

“Well, you picked a good place for that.”

“Speaking from experience?”

His surprise must have shown, because she smiled.

“Maybe I didn’t peg you quite as quickly as you did me,” she said, “but the more I listen to you talk, the more I hear just the subtlest hint of a drawl.”

“You can take a boy out of the south, but you can’t take the south out of the boy,” he mused.

“How far south?”

“Beaufort, South Carolina.”

“What brought you up here?”

“I came north to go to college, met Nick Armstrong there, came to Pinehurst for a visit one summer and decided to stay up here to go into business with him.”

“Do you go home very often?”

“This is my home now.”

“Don’t you have any family left in Beaufort?”

He shook his head again. “There’s just me and my brother, Tyler, and he’s living up here now, too.”

“No wife or ex-wife?” she wondered.

He shuddered at the thought. “No.”

“Well, that was definite enough.”

“Not that I’m opposed to the institution of marriage. In fact, I was the best man when Nick got married.” He grinned. “Both times.”

“He was married to someone before Jessica?”

“To your real estate agent actually.”

Now that came as a surprise to Zoe.

“I don’t know Jessica very well, obviously,” she said. “But the way she talked about Nick, I got the impression they’d been together forever.”

“They’ve been in love forever,” he agreed. “Had a brief romance when they were younger, then went their separate ways and found each other again only last year.”

“Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“It’s a small town,” he reminded her. “And Nick’s ex was remarried long before Jess ever came back to town.”

Zoe thought about the possibility of Scott marrying again, and wondered if she could ever bring herself to be friends with her ex-husband’s new wife. Then she decided it was a moot point. He was out of her life; she’d moved away; they’d both moved on.

She felt the familiar ache of loss, but it wasn’t as sharp or as strong as it once had been. She’d finally accepted that he couldn’t be what she’d needed him to be any more than she could be what he’d wanted. And while her body would always carry the scars of what had finally broken their marriage, she realized that her heart was finally starting to heal.

Mason didn’t know anything about babies, but he couldn’t deny that the pink bundle in Jessica’s arms was kind of cute. Elizabeth Theresa Armstrong had soft blond fuzz on her head, tiny ears and an even tinier nose. She yawned, revealing toothless gums, then blinked and looked at her mother through the biggest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen.

“She’s a beauty, Jess.”

The new mother beamed. “She really is, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “Just like her mother.”

Jess chuckled. “Actually, she looks exactly like Nick’s baby pictures.”

“No kidding?” He glanced at the proud father standing by the window. “Let’s hope she has better luck as she grows up.”

His partner chose to ignore the comment, asking instead, “How was your appointment with Ms. Kozlowski?”

“It was…interesting,” he said, unconsciously echoing Zoe’s description of their initial meeting. He carried the vase of flowers he’d brought for Jessica over to the windowsill to join the other arrangements that were already there. “The house needs a lot of work.”

“What did you think of the owner?” Jess asked.

“I think she needs her head examined,” he said. “And so do you, for not trying to talk her out of buying that place.”

“No one could have talked her out of it.”

Mason had caught only a glimpse of Zoe’s steely determination and guessed Jess was probably right.

“You still should have tried,” he said, setting the pint of promised ice cream and a plastic spoon on the table beside her bed.

“If she hadn’t bought it, we wouldn’t have got the referral,” Nick pointed out. “And it would’ve killed you to watch another architect put his hands all over that house.”

“So long as you keep your hands on the house,” Jess said.

Nick lifted an eyebrow in silent question.

Mason shook his head. “She’s not my type.”

“Is she female?” his friend asked dryly.

“A very attractive female,” Jess interjected. “Who’s new in town and doesn’t need to be hit on by the first guy she meets.”

“I was the consummate professional,” Mason assured her, and it was true—even if he’d had some very personal and inappropriate thoughts about her.

The baby squirmed, and when Jess started to shift her to the other arm, Nick swooped in and picked her up.

“Do you want to hold her?” he asked his friend.

Mason took an instinctive step in retreat. “No, um, thanks, but, um…”

Jess took advantage of having her hands free to reach for the container of ice cream. As she pried open the lid, she commented, “I’ve never seen you back away from a woman before, Mason.”

“My experience is with babes, not babies.” He felt a quick spurt of panic as his friend deposited the infant in his arms and stepped away, leaving the tiny fragile bundle in his awkward grasp. Then he gazed at the angelic face again and his heart simply melted.

He reminded himself that he didn’t want what his friends had. Marriage, children, family—they were the kind of ties he didn’t dare risk. Yet somehow, these friends had become his extended family.