Three Down the Aisle (12 page)

“Did he know what you’d figured out?”

“Of course not,” Pam said with a grin. “But he told her that I was their resident expert, and I knew how to solve the problem.”

“Which you did and saved the day,” Melanie concluded.

“Pretty much. I’d seen some of the plants Jeff had dug out of the ground. Their root systems were being destroyed. We got rid of the little underground critters
that were dining on them, and the next plants we put in thrived. That night Jeff asked to borrow a couple of my textbooks. We started having study dates and eventually concluded we made a pretty good team.”

She beamed at Melanie. “And here we are ten years later, happy as can be.”

“Sounds like a match made in heaven,” Melanie said, unable to keep the wistful note out of her voice.

“It is,” Pam agreed, then seized on the opening Melanie had inadvertently given her. “So what about you and Mike?”

“What about us?” Melanie responded evasively.

“What kind of match are you?”

“The impossible kind,” Melanie said at once.

“I know he has all sorts of baggage where his ex-wife is concerned,” Pam said, “but what about you?”

When Melanie said nothing, Pam added, “Am I being too personal?”

“Pretty much,” Melanie told her, hoping that would put an end to the subject.

“Sorry,” Pam apologized, though she didn’t sound particularly sincere. “How serious is this baggage of yours? An ex-husband?”

Melanie chuckled despite herself. Pam obviously wasn’t a quitter. “No,” she told her. “No ex-husband.”

“Ex-boyfriend, then?”

“Something like that.”

Pam’s eyes widened. “Ex-
girlfriend?
”

“Heavens no!”

“Then what
did
you mean?”

Melanie thought about responding honestly but finally decided she didn’t know Pam well enough for that sort of personal exchange of information. “It’s not worth talking about,” she said eventually, and for the first time
realized it really wasn’t. Jeremy was the one with the problem. That didn’t mean her issues would vanish overnight, but she was gaining some perspective, realizing the whole experience had taught her some home truths about her judgment skills.

Pam regarded her sympathetically. “I know I’m prying, but it’s only because I care about Mike.”

“So do I,” Melanie admitted softly. It was the first time she’d allowed herself to say even that much about her feelings for Mike.

“Then I don’t see the problem,” Pam said. “There’s obviously a powerful attraction at work here. Why not play it out?”

“Too much baggage on both sides,” Melanie said succinctly. Mike’s had made him reticent and gun-shy. Hers had made her aware of her own shortcomings. In such an environment it would be all but impossible for trust to flourish. It was not, she cautioned herself, a combination destined for happily-ever-after.

“But that’s old news,” Pam insisted. “You can both make a fresh start.”

“Maybe neither of us wants to,” Melanie responded.

“You’d rather wallow in your misery the way Mike has been doing ever since he and his wife split up?”

“I don’t want to wallow in it,” Melanie insisted. “But I do hope to learn something from it.”

“How will you know if you’ve learned anything if you don’t put yourself back into the game?” Pam demanded.

“I honestly don’t know,” Melanie admitted.

“I think what you both need is a little nudge from some good friends,” Pam concluded just as the men came in with the steaks.

“Give it a rest, Pam,” Mike said tersely, his worried gaze on Melanie.

Melanie forced a smile. “We’re just indulging in a little girl talk.”

“Ha!” Jeff muttered, giving his wife an affectionate peck on the cheek. “Pam’s on a mission. Mike’s been her personal project since the day he hit town. How many women have you tried to fix him up with, sweetheart?”

“
Tried
being the operative word,” Mike said. “I’ve never said yes.”

“Not even once,” Pam confirmed, looking disgusted. “He’s ruining my track record. I did very well with some of Jeff’s other bachelor friends.”

“What have I always told you?” Mike asked.

“That you’d find someone on your own when you were ready,” she said. Her gaze narrowed as she looked speculatively from him to Melanie and back again. “Have you?”

Mike laughed, even as Melanie’s heart did a little flip-flop.

“Nice try, darlin’,” he said. “Now let’s eat before the steaks get cold.”

He snagged Melanie’s hand and rubbed his thumb reassuringly across her knuckles as he led the way to the table. “Sit next to me,” he requested, pulling out a chair. “That way I can protect you when Pam gets another bee in her bonnet about our relationship.”

“I think Pam’s done for the night,” Jeff said, giving his wife a pointed look.

“Hardly,” she retorted. “But I will give it a rest until dessert. I made a triple-threat chocolate cake. It’s been known to make grown women weep and even a few
men. It’s also a great incentive for getting people to talk.”

“I hate chocolate,” Mike declared.

“Liar,” Pam accused with a grin. “Last time I made it, you told me all sorts of secrets just to get a second slice.”

Melanie chuckled at Mike’s stunned expression.

“You used that cake to wheedle information out of me?” he asked incredulously.

“Of course,” Pam confessed.

Mike turned to Melanie. “Told you we needed to get out of here before dessert.”

“For a triple-threat chocolate cake, I think I’ll take my chances,” Melanie said.

“Your funeral,” he muttered darkly.

More than likely, Melanie thought. But she didn’t have to reveal anything she didn’t want these three people to know. She could have her cake and keep her secrets, too.

But gazing into Mike’s eyes, feeling the faint beginnings of the same heat he’d stirred in her a few nights ago, she was beginning to wonder why she felt it necessary.

M
ike couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt so relaxed or spent such an enjoyable evening with friends. Even Pam’s persistent questions hadn’t fazed him after a while, probably because Melanie had taken them in stride and fended them off with considerable aplomb. She’d gotten through a huge piece of Pam’s triple-threat chocolate cake without revealing a single secret. Since he’d hoped for a few more insights into her relationship with the married man who’d betrayed her, he’d found that a little frustrating, but he had to admire her clever avoidance tactics.

Carrying a sleeping Jessie out to the car at midnight, he was struck by how right it all felt. He couldn’t think of a single time during his tumultuous marriage that he’d experienced such a sense of contentment. After the first months of their marriage, Linda had flatly refused to socialize with their old friends, no doubt because she
preferred doing drugs in private. It had isolated them, making it that much harder for him to adjust once the breakup happened.

Knowing—from bitter past experience and from Melanie’s own commitment to leaving—that the contented feeling wouldn’t last made him suddenly edgy and silent.

“What’s wrong?” Melanie asked eventually as they neared her cottage.

“Nothing.”

She regarded him with obvious impatience. “Come on, Mike. You had a smile on your face not fifteen minutes ago, when we left Jeff and Pam’s. Now you look as if you’ve just received the worst possible news.”

“In a way, that’s exactly what happened,” he admitted. “I realized that this entire evening was phony.”

She stared at him incredulously. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

He struggled to put his emotions into words, something he usually avoided at all costs. “There we were,” he began, “pretending not to be a couple.”

Melanie nodded. “Which we aren’t.”

He regarded her bleakly. “Yet everything felt as if we were. Jeff and Pam could see it, too. They won’t let me hear the end of it. Pam’s going to want us to announce a wedding date soon. It’s just the way she is. She’s happy, and she wants everyone around her to be happy, too. She’s convinced marriage is the key.”

Melanie’s expression faltered. “Oh, Mike, I’m sorry. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. I should never have agreed to go to dinner. It just added fuel to her already overactive imagination, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s not the worst of it,” he admitted.

“Then what is?”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to lay his own emotions so
bare, so he settled for asking her, “You enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

“Except for dodging some of Pam’s questions, yes,” she admitted candidly.

“It felt right?” he prodded. “Comfortable?”

“Yes, it did.”

He pulled into her driveway, cut the engine and turned to face her. “Does that make as little sense to you as it does to me?”

“Which part? That we enjoyed ourselves or that we’re fighting it?”

“Either one.”

Melanie stared straight ahead for so long, Mike was sure she didn’t intend to answer, but she finally turned and met his gaze.

“It’s where we are,” she said quietly. “We can’t change that. We’re both trying to be as honest as we know how to be.”

“Maybe we should try to change where we are,” he persisted. It was something he’d never thought he would say. He’d never imagined that he would reach a point when he might be willing to risk his heart again, but to have the feelings he’d experienced tonight last forever, maybe it would be worth it. Melanie wasn’t Linda. Far from it. She was strong. Maybe this time things wouldn’t fall apart, if they recognized what they had and fought like hell to keep it.

“Can you do that?” she asked doubtfully. “Can you put aside the past and move forward?”

He wasn’t sure. He wanted to, but he was as terrified as she obviously was. “Frankly, I’ve never tried before, but I’d like to,” he admitted. “You?”

“I don’t know if I can, Mike,” she whispered. “I just don’t know. It’s not just you I’m not sure about. In fact,
it really has nothing to do with you. It’s my own judgment I don’t trust.”

“Aren’t you even willing to try?” he asked. “What we have is too precious, too rare, to turn our backs on it, just because we’re scared. You were with that married man for how long?”

“Six months.”

“I was with Linda for a couple of years. I’d vowed to stick by her in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. For nearly a year of that the marriage was a disaster. It was the worst. If I can try to put that behind me, surely you can move beyond a few months with a guy you obviously never knew very well.”

“You make it sound so easy, as if we can just snap our fingers and all those pesky hurts and bad choices will disappear.”

“I know they won’t disappear,” he said impatiently. “But maybe it’s possible to put them in perspective, to leave them in the past.” He gave her a penetrating look. “Or are you still hung up on the guy? Is that what’s really going on?”

“Absolutely not,” she said so fiercely he had to believe her.

“Then why are you hesitating? I’m not suggesting we run off and get married tomorrow, just that we work on what we have, see where it could take us.”

“I still have to go back to Boston,” she said with a trace of stubbornness, ignoring the rest. “That hasn’t changed.”

Mike wanted to pound his fist on the steering wheel in frustration, but he didn’t. He merely asked, “Why? What’s holding you there?”

She hesitated, as if she weren’t quite certain herself, then said, “My family. My roots.”

“You have roots here, too,” he reminded her.

“I have memories,” she corrected. “It’s not the same thing.”

Mike stared at her silently, aware that he’d lost. Whatever she’d left behind in Boston—and he didn’t believe for a minute it was as simple as family or roots—was more important than what she’d found here. And he couldn’t continue pushing, couldn’t continue fighting a losing battle, not with Jessie’s heart to consider along with his own.

“I guess that says it all, then,” he said finally. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your door.”

She looked almost as miserable as he felt. “You don’t need to do that,” she said stiffly.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” he repeated, climbing from the car and going around to yank open the passenger door with considerably more force than necessary.

Only when Melanie was standing next to him, with the moon casting light on her cheeks, did he notice the tears. He brushed them away with the pad of his thumb and felt his heart wrench.

“This is wrong,” he murmured, right before bending down to kiss her. Even as he spoke, he wasn’t entirely certain what he meant…the kiss, the unnecessary parting, any of it.

Because he wasn’t sure, he didn’t let himself sink into the kiss the way he wanted to, didn’t taste her greedily or linger long enough to make her moan. It was enough just to feel her respond, to feel her sway instinctively toward him, to feel her heat. All of that felt every bit as right as the rest of the evening had. How could she turn her back on that? How could
he?

He sighed at the mess they’d gotten themselves into.
It was wrong to want her so badly, knowing that it couldn’t be.

But, damn, no matter what she said, no matter what his head told him, it felt right.

Melanie was still shaking long after Mike returned to his car and his daughter and drove away. She put her fingers to her lips, which continued to tingle from that last, lingering, unexpected kiss.

There had been so much sorrow in his voice, so much pain in his eyes, and she was responsible for that. She’d only been honest, only told him what they both already knew, that whatever this was they were feeling couldn’t last. Even so, she felt as if she’d ripped out his heart.

And her own.

Why else would she feel so miserable if she hadn’t fallen just a little bit in love with him?

“That can’t be,” she said fiercely, denying the feelings that bubbled up inside of her every time she thought of him.

There was no one around to challenge the claim, so she accepted it, just as she’d used it to keep a firm distance between them. Refusing to acknowledge her feelings was enough for now. If she pretended hard enough that Mike didn’t matter, then she’d be able to leave when the time came.

And it had to be soon, she warned herself. She couldn’t let this situation drag out forever, for his sake and her own. If she’d made up her mind to go, then she needed to do it.

She’d barely closed the front door behind her when the phone rang. Grateful for anything that might take her mind off Mike, she grabbed it.

But when she heard her big sister’s voice, she burst into tears.

“Mel, what’s going on? Melanie, talk to me right this second,” Ashley ordered when Melanie’s sobs went on and on. “Dammit, do I have to get in the car and drive down there?”

That prospect dried the tears as nothing else could have. “No,” Melanie whispered hoarsely.

“That’s better,” Ashley soothed. “Now tell me what happened.”

“I think I’m falling in love with Mike,” she blurted, mostly to hear the words aloud, to see how true they rang. Unfortunately, they sounded dead-on accurate.

“Well, hallelujah!” her sister said.

“But I can’t be in love with him,” Melanie protested. “It’s absurd. I hardly know him. Besides, I don’t live here. I live in Boston.”

“Not at the moment,” Ashley reminded her, obviously trying to suppress a chuckle. “As for it being too soon, sometimes it doesn’t take all that long. Not when it’s right.”

“The last time I fell in love, it was all wrong.”

“I’ll say,” Ashley said lightly. “But you’re a smart woman. You learned your lesson.”

“Did I? How can you tell? I can’t.”

“Are there things Mike’s keeping from you?”

“Yes,” she said automatically, seizing on the excuse.

“What?”

Pressed, Melanie wasn’t entirely sure she knew why she was so uneasy about his lack of openness. “He won’t talk about his marriage, not in any kind of detail. He’s only told me it’s over, that his ex-wife was into drugs, so he divorced her and got full custody of Jessie.”

“That sounds like a lot of information to me,” Ashley commented. “Did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, what’s the problem?”

“What if I’m wrong? What if there’s more to it? What if he’d take her back in a heartbeat if she got her life straightened out?”

“And what if you’re right to trust what he’s telling you?” Ashley demanded. “What if it’s all over and it’s you he wants?”

“I thought you guys didn’t trust him,” Melanie reminded her, irritated that her big sister was defending Mike now.

“No, we just told you to be sure you’d gotten all the facts about his past up-front. Look, sweetie, we can’t make this decision for you. You’re the only one who can decide if you love him and if he’s worth the changes you’ll need to make to keep him in your life.”

“He might be.” Melanie thought of the way she’d felt when they’d made love. It hadn’t been just about sex. He’d made her feel…cherished.

And tonight? Tonight he’d opened a part of his life to her by sharing an evening with his friends. That was something Jeremy the jerk had never done, because he couldn’t, because she was nothing but a dirty little secret in his life.

There was Jessie, too. Despite his concerns, Mike was permitting Melanie to get to know his daughter, the most precious person in his life. She knew him well enough by now to realize that he would never have allowed that to happen if he hadn’t trusted Melanie not to break his little girl’s heart.

He was letting her, slowly but surely, into his life, but she couldn’t say the same. She’d kept her secrets, tried
to keep Mike away from her sisters, pushed him away when he’d tried to ask for anything more than the most superficial relationship. She was doing a damn fine job of trying to protect herself, but what had it gotten her? She’d fallen for him anyway. She could walk away, but her heart would still be broken.

“I’m an idiot,” she said eventually.

“Never,” Ashley said loyally.

“Mike wouldn’t agree with you.”

“Then he’s the idiot.”

“No, he’s not,” she said adamantly.

Ashley laughed. “If you’re that quick to jump to his defense, I think you have your answer, baby sister. Now what are you going to do about it?”

Melanie leaned against the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the floor. “I wish to hell I knew.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Ashley said with confidence. “If you need any help, all you have to do is call. We’ll come down there and cut through all the nonsense until the answer’s plain as day.”

Melanie smiled. “I think I’ll try to get this one on my own.”

“You know we love you.”

“That goes both ways,” she told her sister.

“And something tells me you’ll find room in your heart for Mike and Jessie, too.”

Melanie was beginning to believe that herself. She just had to pray that it wasn’t too late.

“When can we see Melanie again?” Jessie asked for the thousandth time over breakfast. It had been a week since Mike had left her at her door, tears on her cheeks, his own heart heavy. “I thought she was our friend.”

“She is,” Mike replied grumpily. He’d been having
a lot of sleepless nights, thanks to Melanie and her stubborn refusal to give the two of them half a chance. He wasn’t inclined to cut her much slack this morning. He’d honestly thought she might call him by now, that she’d reconsider.

“Then why can’t we see her?” Jessie persisted.

“What’s this sudden fascination with Melanie?” he asked, although he already knew the answer. Melanie had captivated both of them. As for him, he’d been in a lousy mood ever since he’d made love to her, ever since he’d discovered he was half in love with her and then realized she was going to walk out of his life all the same.

“She’s nice,” Jessie explained, as if that was more than enough to inspire her undying loyalty. “And she’s a girl. She knows stuff you don’t.”

“Such as?”

“She can braid my hair.”

Mike stared at his daughter, bemused. “I didn’t know you wanted your hair braided.”