Page 6 of The Marriage Deal
The woman is wearing denim overalls cut into shorts. They’re baggy enough to conceal the ball busting curves I know she hides underneath. Or that’s what I think until I catch sight of the smooth skin of her waist where the denim cut is low, and the crop of her top is high.
Fuck. Me.
I avert my gaze, but it’s not long before it’s pulled by that gravitational magnetic force to her again.
I quit fighting the pull and settle in to sip my coffee as I watch the show that isher.
She moves now with a weightlessness that somehow conceals the heaviness that loomed, threatening to crush her that first day I’d seen her leaning over the cliff. Her life had flashed before my eyes in that moment. No, not her life. My life.
I’m losing my mind.
But I’d seen her with me. My hands in her hair, her body in my arms. Felt the beat of her heart against mine all before I’d seen her face. Before I ever fell into the pools of buttery brown, drunk off the spice of rum.
I didn’t know what it meant, excused it as a natural fear that anyone might experience when seeing someone on the cusp of throwing in the towel of life. But I’m beginning to think it’s more.
Maybe I’ve been repressing my true nature all my life and something about her has pulled out the crazy in me. Because I think I might be obsessed with this woman.
Isn’t that what it means when a man can’t get a woman out of his head? Thinks of her every second of the day and night? Loses sleep over the thought of hunting her down and begging for a date, a taste of her lips.
Christ, I need therapy.
I don’t even like the woman. She’s utterly maddening and entirely not my type.
And yet…
She drops the little bunch of flowers into a mason jar filled with water on top of the glass display showcasing freshly baked goods. I watch, ensnared, as she dances behind the counter into the waiting arms of the man who served me.
A spear of something hot and bitterly uncomfortable wedges its way through my chest, stealing my breath even as I struggle to choke it down. The feeling is disturbingly foreign. I watch, unable to look away, as he pulls back to drop a quick kiss to her forehead.
That’s when I realize what the uncomfortable feeling is: jealousy.
I don’t think I’ve been jealous over a woman a day in my life.
An aged chuckle rich with years and threaded with a wisdom I have no interest in facing demands my attention. I shift reluctantly to look at the woman I’d given a polite nod to when I’d first claimed my table. Milky blue eyes are no longer fixed to the crossword puzzle she’d been working on, but instead bounce between me and the nameless little lunatic who now makes herself a cup of coffee as though she owns the place.
Maybe she does own the place?
“Pretty little thing, isn’t she?” Her voice is lowenough not to draw attention, but still, a shiver of unease crawls over my flesh.
“Don’t know about pretty,” I lie.
The lines around her eyes deepen with a knowing smirk. “Mmmhmm.”
She pens another word into the puzzle. I’m close enough to read it. DELUDER.
I sigh. Fitting. I’m deluding myself if I think the woman behind the counter is anything but the most enchanting woman I’ve ever seen.
The old woman knows it.
Even the crossword puzzle knows it.
Fate hates me.
I mutter, “She’s a thief.”
The old woman’s brows wing up. “She stole from you?”
Only my heart straight out of my chest when she jumped off that cliff to—what I’d thought for all of five seconds had been to her death. Before I realized I’d been rudely punked.
