Page 14 of Suddenly Single
Jenny didn’t know what she was going to do at the Cassian, honestly.She didn’t know what she was doing anywhere.She waved at the woman and stepped outside with her two bags and walked next door to the coffee shop.
Lakeshore Coffeewas crowded.Small bistro tables were filled with people drinking out of enormous coffee cups. They were chatting or glued to their laptops.Jenny ordered a bear claw and a cup of coffee, and maneuvered her way out to one of the little bistro tables on the sidewalk.
She had hardly drunk any of the coffee when she spotted Edan.He was just down the street, a plastic shopping bag in one hand.He was speaking to two women.Or rather, they were speaking.She couldn’t see his face, but she imagined him standing there, just staring at them with those green eyes, his jaw set.What were they doing? Checking in on him? Asking how he was doing after the death of his fiancée? Maybe they were inviting him over for a kidney pie.One of them looked like a woman who’d done her fair share of baking.Did they eat kidney pie in Scotland, or was that just an English thing? Jenny had tried kidney pie once, at a restaurant in New York.It was god-awful—
Edan suddenly broke away and strode toward her, his walk powerful and strong.He motioned toward the car as he neared her, and for a brief moment, she thought he meant for her to make a run for it.But in the time she took to figure out why they needed to make a run for it, and finish her coffee, he reached her table.He looked down at her bags, then at her bear claw.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m not keeping you from your friends, am I?” She looked over his shoulder to where the two women were still standing, their eyes fixed on Edan.Or maybe their eyes were fixed on her—at this distance, Jenny couldn’t tell whom exactly they were studying so intently.
“No’ friends,” he said, ushering her along.“Acquaintances.Come on, then.” He reached down and picked up her bags.
Jenny appreciated chivalry, but she hadn’t finished her coffee. She stood up, gulped as much coffee as she could, and grabbed her bear claw as she followed him to the car and watched him load her bags into the trunk.
When he closed the trunk, he looked at the bear claw pastry. “Hunger seems to be a constant state with you.”
“You have no idea,” Jenny muttered.
As they pulled out of the car park and started back the way they’d come, she scrutinized this man who, according to the local grocery store clerk, had lost his fiancée and now wouldn’t come out for coffee.It was hard to believe he’d managed to remain free of attachment, knowing what she did about how the female brain operated.He had all the core requisites for the Perfect Match: sexy accent, check.Handsome, check—especially today with that shadow of beard and longish, mussed hair. He needed love, check.Anyone who had suffered the loss of a fiancée needed love. And, last but not least—he had money.Well, she was surmising he did. People who owned inns couldn’t be poor, could they?
No matter, she couldn’t believe some woman hadn’t swooped in to help him with his grief.At least come around to check on him. Just how long had he been hiding away at the Cassian, anyway? And what was this Italian business? She was dying to know the answers to these questions but knew from experience that outright interrogation was not the way to go.
As Edan pulled away from the curb, and she gripped the door to keep her seat as he hit the gas, she asked, as if the thought had just occurred to her, “Just curious, how long have you been in the States?”
“Four hundred years,” he said.
Jenny sputtered a laugh.“Well, that’s amazing, because you don’t look a day over forty.”
“Forty!” he exclaimed, and muttered under his breath. “I’m thirty-four, aye?”
“Aye,” she said, smiling.
He glanced at her from the corner of her eye before turning a corner.“And you?”
“Twenty-nine,” she said.
He looked back to the road.
“So how long have you been here?” she asked.
He slowed to stop at an intersection. “Five years.”
“What? That means you arrived when you were twenty-nine, just like me! I mean,notlike me, but you embarked on a new adventure when you were twenty-nine.”
Edan drove on. “Are you embarking on a new adventure, then?”
“Open to interpretation.” A lot of interpretation, actually, because she had no clue what she was doing. “Do you ever think about doing something entirely different? A whole new occupation?”
He shrugged as he turned onto the main road and sped up.Jenny put her hand on the dash to keep herself from flying out the window.“No,” he said.“I’ve always known I’d take part in the family business.”
“Lucky you. Istillhaven’t figured out what I want to do with my life. I’ve had great ideas in theory.But then, when I pursue them, the actual idea doesn’t turn out like I thought.Like minoring in history.Ilovehistory, and just assumed I’d be a college professor.But there aren’t so many of those jobs around, and even if you get one, you have to do all this stuff to get tenure.So then I got into Buddhism.”
He seemed startled.“Are those two things related?”
“Nope. But I was interested, and I thought it might lead to something.” She snorted. “It didn’t. However, it is a very interesting belief system if you’re into that sort of thing.”
He did not indicate one way or the other.
“Then, I had a job at a plant nursery, which I loved.Except the pay was paltry, and it was really far from my dad—he has Parkinson’s and needed me, you know—and I felt dirty all the time, because there is a lot of dirt involved in the plant industry.But I learned alot, and I haven’t even mentioned my yearlong stint in premed.I wanted to be a nutritionist.I’m all about whole foods and plant-based diets.”
