Page 5 of Flirting with Forever

“Oh. I’m sorry.” She meant it too. She’d never been married, but she’d seen enough of her friends’ marriages dissolve to know just how much it could screw up somebody’s life.

“Don’t be.” He shrugged. “Long time coming. The name’s James, by the way.”

“Mary.”

“Well, Mary, pretty cool selection of, um, these thingies you have here.”

She laughed, finding his bumbling, blushing manner to be pretty freaking cute. “Those are napkin rings.”

James puttered around the shop as Mary worked on the window display, the two of them idly chatting about the knickknacks that she sold and his construction work on a brownstone three blocks over. He was glancing her way an awful lot, and Mary was starting to feel a little blushy. He was just so dang good-looking. A buzz started in her gut.

In her early twenties, she never, ever used to ask a man out. Her mother’s training had been clear. It was a man’s job to do that. Being too forward would only emasculate him.

Cora was the one who’d helped her see that if a man was emasculated, that was his problem, not hers. In her midtwenties, Mary had started to ask people out. That didn’t mean that it was any less scary now than it used to be.

Her cheeks went hot and so did her palms as she turned to James. “I was wondering, James...”

He turned to her, a complicated expression on his face.

The bell jingled on the front door, but Mary didn’t turn around to see who’d come in.

“Would you want to grab dinner with me sometime?” she finished, hoping her voice didn’t carry to whoever had just entered her shop.

“Oh,” James said in that same smooth voice that had been making Mary’s stomach flip for the last fifteen minutes. He took a step closer to her and tugged a hand through his hair. It was then that Mary saw the flash of gold. On his left hand.

Right.Rightrightrightrightright.

“When I said ex-wife,” he mumbled, his eyes flicking behind her toward the newcomer in the shop, “I probably should have said soon-to-be ex-wife. But we’re, yeah, in mediation and I probably shouldn’t...”

She refused to be the one who was embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. But she still couldn’t stop the flood of heat in her cheeks. And sure enough, here came the underboob sweat. Like freaking clockwork.

“Oh. Okay.” She rose up from where she’d been crouching to arrange the flowers, still holding a few of them in her hands. “That’s fine. Good luck with all that.”

James stepped forward. He seemed to be purposefully ignoring the other shopper. “I didn’t mean to mislead you or anything. You’re just so pretty and I was having such a bad day until you smiled at me.”

Ugh. Did he have to be so cute? “It’s totally fine. Good luck with everything!” She gave him a bright smile so that he wouldn’t continue this apology that was only allowing embarrassment to dig its claws more forcefully into her.

“Right,” he mumbled. “You too.” And then he ambled out of the shop, shooting Mary a fairly miserable look through the shop window as he went back the way he’d come.

Mary resisted the urge to crumple up into a raisin and die and turned to the new customer with a sunny smile on her face.

She’d once stood on a curb when a cab had driven past and splashed muddy puddle water all over her new Anthropologie skirt. This was pretty much the emotional equivalent of that.

Because standing in her shop was a sympathetic-looking Estrella and a bitingly disdainful-looking John, his elbow firmly in his mother’s grip.

The smile vaporized off Mary’s face and she just sort of stared at them. If there had been one person on God’s spinning earth that Mary would not have wanted to see her ask out a married man and be rejected, it would be John Modesto-Whitford. The memory of his surly judgment two nights ago was painfully fresh in Mary’s mind. She didn’t let that kind of thing get too under her skin, but this one definitely hadn’t quite healed over yet.

“Mary!” Estrella said brightly, obviously determined to ignore the romantic crash and burn they’d just witnessed. “How are you? The shop looks beautiful as always. You know John, my son. He was taking his mother out to lunch around the corner and I wanted him to see your lovely shop.”

Mary’s eyes flicked over to the man in the black slacks, white dress shirt and dark blue tie. And yup, shiny wingtips. It was Saturday, for God’s sake! How deep into the wingtip cult did a man have to be to wear wingtips on a Saturday?

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” John returned in a voice that was a bit scratchy, two-toned almost.

“I’m going to quick run to the USPS up the block,” Estrella chirped. “Mary, do you have a second to show John your shop?”

Estrella didn’t wait for an answer before she ducked toward the front door, nudging her son forward at the same time.

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