He laughed. “I just want to be fair and this isn’t.”
“It is if I say it is.”
He shook his head and after finishing his second slice of pizza he wrote her a check. “I’m still including gas and mileage—consider it a bonus, or whatever you want.”
Nati began to protest and he held up a hand to stop her. “No argument. I’m not used to having to argue to give someone more money.”
He added that last part under his breath, as if it had special meaning to him that Nati didn’t have to understand. But before she could say anything else the check was written out so she had no choice but to concede.
Plus she was a little distracted with just looking at him, taking in his khaki slacks and the way his long-sleeved hunter-green polo shirt hugged his broad shoulders and impressively muscled chest.
“Did your grandmother decide how she wants the hope chest done?” she asked as she picked up her pizza crust to finish it.
“She did. She likes the more antiquey-looking one rather than the brighter one you and I would have picked. I guess she wants the design restored but she wants it to look original.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
“And I’m still thinking about having you do another wall, but if you don’t raise your price you’re going to make me feel guilty.”
“You want price gouging?”
“I want to be fair.”
Nati rolled her eyes at him.
When they’d both finished eating, Nati went out to the counter to retrieve a jar of mints she kept hidden there. Those served as dessert. Then she put Cade to work.
“I just finished these tables so they need to go out front,” she explained. “I was going to have to drag them but with two of us we can each lift an end and carry them. I have some new stock I want to display on them—some new punched tinware, and that set of plates, and those mugs, and all five of the teapots, along with the old campfire coffeepots. That will all go on one table. On the second table—” She pointed out the rest of the merchandise she’d painted especially for the festival, including doll furniture, two benches, a child’s rocking chair and three toy boxes.
“You got all this done and did my wall?” Cade marveled when she was finished.
She would have accomplished even more if she hadn’t spent as much time with him as she had. Or lost hours to daydreaming about him.
But she only said, “I did.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
Not as well as she had before she’d started to take images of him to bed with her, before she’d begun to replay his every word and relive every kiss.
But she wasn’t going to say that, either. “I’m starting a business—I have to give it all I’ve got.” And with that in mind, she added, “So let’s move the tables—you take that end, I’ll take this one.”
The tables were both antiques. Nati had refinished them then added designs—she’d painted a border on the drop leaf of the round table, and stenciled a filigree in the center and at each corner of the rectangular one.
As they carefully maneuvered the first of them through the doorway that led to the front of the shop, Cade said, “So... Friday night and no date, huh?”
“I don’t really date.”
“You went out with me last night.”
“Yeah, but... Well, that’s the first time since before I was married. Since my divorce.”
“And you were married to...”
He wanted to get into the meat of things tonight, did he?
But did she want to let him?
There were a lot of things she wanted to let him do but talking about her marriage hadn’t been on the list.
On the other hand, maybe it was good to let him know where she stood.
So she decided to answer him. “I was married for six and a half years to a guy named Douglas Pirfoy.”
“There are Pirfoys who own an airline—we had a contract with their freight division for air shipments for a while.”
“Until the Camdens bought their own planes—I actually remember something about that,” Nati said. The Pirfoys had been furious about the fact that the Camdens were also offering air shipment services to some of the Pirfoys’ other customers and costing them business.
“I don’t remember the name Douglas in any of our dealings, though.”
“Doug. He’s the heir apparent but he’s yet to do more than look at the world as his playground. His father—”
“Eldridge?”
“Right. He’s still in charge, and he claims that he’d like it if Doug would do more, but he also likes having all the power and calling all the shots, so he doesn’t push it. In fact he indulges Doug like a kid and loves hearing about Doug’s adventures, which only encourages Doug not to settle down.”
“But he settled down to marry you....”
Nati laughed wryly at that. “Right. Yeah. Not so much.”
“Uh-oh... He was a cheater?”
“No, actually, cheating was the one thing he didn’t do.”
“Because why go out for beer when you have champagne at home...” Cade muttered, looking over his shoulder as he walked backward with the table.
Nati wasn’t sure she was meant to hear that and even though it made her smile she still had to refute it. “It was more like falling in love and getting married was an experience he’d already had. Since he only likes new adventures, new thrills, he was on to the next thing he or his friends could think of doing.”
“Which left you where, in the scheme of things?” Cade asked as they returned to the workroom for the second table.
“Home. Occasionally, he made a pit stop there, in between sailing a barge down the Nile and skydiving in the Amazon and sled racing in Alaska. The rest of the time, I was left alone with his mother trying to mold me into someone she would have preferred her son to have married.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Cade said ominously. “Where did you meet Pirfoy anyway?”
“College. I was at CU in Boulder on scholarship but to Doug it was just a great party town, so it was where he went to play when it was time for the college experience. He rarely went to classes—the school wasn’t going to flunk him out when they were hitting his father for donations right and left. For Doug college was just about frat parties and girls and one wild excursion after another. Whatever he and his rich friends could dream up.”
“If he didn’t go to classes and you did, did you just cross paths on campus?”
“I had to work part time doing whatever I could—tutoring, babysitting, cleaning houses, dog walking, any odd job I could pick up. I met Doug when he hired me to waitress at an incredibly elaborate Gatsby-themed weekend in the mountains. Maybe it was the uniform I had to wear, but something about me that night sparked his interest. I figured he just wanted to diddle the help—”
“Diddle the help?” Cade repeated with a laugh.
Nati had overheard his parents use that term in reference to her relationship with their son. She shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it, I turned him down. For the rest of our freshman year. Most of sophomore year, too. I suppose that made me too much of a challenge for someone like Doug to resist—”
“So he kept at it until he won you over.”
“He’s a charming, personable, attractive guy. And I’m only human—flying me to Maine for lobster, romantic picnics in places I would never have imagined—like on a mountain top that could only be reached by helicopter where he’d had a table and booth cut out of the snow, with a grill chef waiting to cook for us.”
“Amazing....”
“Amazing me was one of Doug’s specialties early on. And I was just...me. An only kid from a working-class family, getting swept off my feet by someone who could afford to do some mind-boggling sweeping. So yes, event
ually he won me over—and not just because of his stunts, the stunts were just the backdrop for a guy who’s intelligent and witty and clever and quick and really, really charming....”
Which she’d said twice now because it was so true.
“You’re giving me an inferiority complex and making me wonder why you’d ever divorce a guy you still only have good things to say about,” Cade complained as they went back and forth between the workroom and shop front with the merchandise that she wanted displayed for the festival.
Nati laughed because the idea of Cade being inferior to anyone—let alone Doug—was just plain funny.
“Remember, I was young and not nearly as worldly as Doug. I learned all too well that his charm was superficial, that there wasn’t any substance behind it. But by senior year marriage was his next great frontier, so he kept at me about that. I held out for a while after graduation—almost a year.”
“The time you spent working with the art restoration company.”
“Right. And rather than going back to Philadelphia where he lived, Doug got an apartment here so he could still be with me. After a while...” Nati shrugged and said fatalistically, “I loved him and finally let him convince me to elope to Paris with him.” Her voice had grown quiet. She busied herself with bringing out more of the merchandise from the back room.
“You eloped,” Cade repeated, not letting her off the hook as he carried out the larger items. “No big society wedding?”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m sure Doug knew that there was no way his parents would have been on board with him marrying me—they were appalled when they found out who I was.”
“Who you were?”
“The daughter of truckers. The granddaughter of a housepainter. Not of their ilk—that was one of the nicer ways his mother put it when she was trying to teach me how to behave in ‘their world.’ Basically they figured I’d married their son for the money and that I was going to cost them. Which, I guess, ultimately, I did.”
Cade glanced around her workroom as he picked up one of the benches to take into the front of the store. “This doesn’t look like the lap-of-luxury from a big, fat divorce settlement....”
“I cost them money when my grandmother got sick four years ago with kidney disease. The medical bills were outrageous and my grandfather was going to have to sell his house. I asked Doug if we could help them out. He went to his father—because his father controls everything—and they did help, but the money was a loan and they expected my grandparents to pay interest.”
Cade’s eyebrows rose. “So let me see if I have all this straight—you married the heir apparent and got stuck spending more time with his nasty mother than with him, and when your family needed help the Pirfoys gave it but only as a loan?”
“Right. And then my grandmother died and I found out I was pregnant and things really got bad,” Nati said with a sad laugh, remembering the nightmare she’d found herself in.
“Your grandmother dying was bad,” he agreed. “But you getting pregnant was bad, too?”
“Doug couldn’t have cared less—about either, actually. He didn’t even come here with me when my grandmother was sick.”
“You weren’t living here?”
“Once we got married, we lived on the Pirfoy’s estate back in Philadelphia. He didn’t see any reason for us to have our own place when his parents’ place was so big—plus it was another way for him to avoid taking any kind of responsibility—”
“So you were separated from your own family, too?”
“Completely. The Pirfoys didn’t want to associate with them or even acknowledge that I had a family because they didn’t come with a pedigree. I’d get back here to visit when I could but it wasn’t as often as I wanted. And it definitely wasn’t like living here.”
“And he didn’t even come here with you for...what? Your grandmother’s funeral?”
“Doug was snorkeling with his buddies in Bimini. There was no way he was cutting that short for something as unimportant to him as my grandmother’s funeral.”
“Nice,” Cade said venomously. “I’m surprised you didn’t divorce him then—except you were pregnant...”
“Yeah. But then, when it came to a baby...” Oh, it had been months and months—why couldn’t she say this without a catch in her throat?
Nati swallowed but still her voice was quieter when she went on. “The pregnancy was unplanned and when it came to a baby, when I told him I was pregnant, he shrugged and said, ‘Okay, yeah, sure, a baby. If you want to have it, have it.’ But he made sure I knew that it wasn’t changing anything for him. A baby didn’t fall into the category of adventure or a frontier to conquer.”
“But there’s no baby...” Cade said very, very carefully.
Nati kept from crying by focusing on setting up the display of hand-painted dishes. And not blinking. “No, no baby. I miscarried. Something else that Doug just shrugged off.”
Nati took a deep breath that made her shoulders rise and fall in an elaborate shrug of her own and opted to get to the end of this conversation as quickly as she could.
“That was it for me. I couldn’t spend another minute with his mother telling me how I dressed wrong, how I did everything below her standards, how I’d never ‘be one of them’ in order to have a mock marriage with a man I hardly ever saw, who couldn’t have cared less about me. And my grandfather was grieving and I realized that this was really where I wanted to be. So I filed for divorce. That was when the real fun started.” She also couldn’t keep anger from her tone.
“I’m assuming that eloping meant no prenup...”
“No, no prenup—to Doug’s parents’ horror. But they had a whole league of high-paid, high-powered lawyers to come at me in spite of that and the Pirfoys held the paperwork on my grandfather’s loan—their ace in the hole. I just wanted out, so that was my divorce settlement—my grandfather’s loan was canceled and I came home.”
“Oh, you made a baaad deal. For six and a half years of putting up with what you put up with, all you came out with was canceling a debt that shouldn’t have been there in the first place?”
“I stayed with Doug as long as I did because I thought he would change. I kept thinking that he’d get the restlessness, the recklessness out of his system, that he’d go to work, and we’d end up with a normal marriage. I guess I just deluded myself. But he was my husband and I loved him. When we were together, when he wasn’t off on some adventure, we were good together—”
“But after all that, to leave you nothing in the divorce is outrageous.” The anger in Cade’s voice won him points.
“Divorcing Doug—and the Pirfoys—was like a game of dodge ball where I was the only target. They and all their lawyers just kept throwing ball after ball after ball at me until all I could do was protect my head and huddle in the corner hoping to survive. I had lawyers even saying I was careless, that that’s what had caused the miscarriage, that I’d been ‘maliciously irresponsible’ about my pregnancy, which was such a lie....”
“Of course it was,” Cade said sympathetically and Nati just hoped he hadn’t notice that her voice had cracked again.
She gathered some strength and went on, still genuinely trying to conclude this. “The first two lawyers I went to wouldn’t even go up against the Pirfoys. The one who finally agreed to take me on was willing to do a David-against-Goliath thing. But when they threatened my grandfather over the loan, I just decided nothing was worth what they were putting us both through, so I took the settlement they offered and that was that—I chalked it up to experience.”
Experience that told her loud and clear that she shouldn’t go anywhere near another rich boy and yet there she was enjoying a glimpse of Cade’s great rear end when he bent over to pick up the box of coffee and teapots he’d carried in and set on the floor.
He hoisted the box up onto the table so she could get to work arranging the display. The expression on his oh-so-handsome face was distressed.
“So, if your family had stayed in Northbridge and you’d gone to college there you wouldn’t have met Pirfoy and—”
Nati laughed. “You keep going back to Northbridge,” she observed curiously. “But that doesn’t really mean anything to me. I just think that whatever happens in our lives is meant to happen. Even if it’s hard to find a reason.”
“It’s hard to find a reason for this,” Cade muttered.
Nati shrugged. “Regardless of everything else, if not for the Pirfoys paying my grandmother’s medical bills, my grandparents would have lost their house before my grandmother died. But that didn’t happen. That’s something.”
Cade laughed wryly. “And that’s enough for you? After six and half years of put-downs and neglect, after dealing with a nasty mother-in-law, after losing a baby?”
Nati didn’t want to—she couldn’t—think too much about the baby.
“I have my grandfather,” she said. “We have the house. I have Holly and now my own business—on the Camden scale that probably seems like nothing. But on the Morrison scale, we’re doing okay.”
Cade’s frown told her he wasn’t convinced but he didn’t say anything.
Once she’d finished arranging everything on the tables, Nati stood back to look over her work.
“I think that’s it,” she judged. “It took so much less time with help—thanks.”
“Just earning my supper,” Cade claimed as they both picked up the empty boxes and trays and returned to the workroom.
Cade deposited the boxes he was carrying in a corner, then pointed his chiseled chin in the direction of something a customer had brought to her that afternoon. “What is that?” He went over to it.
“It’s an old Victorian fainting couch. I need to redo the gold tip on the pattern carved in the wood around the upholstery.”
Cade straddled the bottom end of the couch and sat down, bending over to pat the spot in front of him in invitation.
Corner-Office Courtship Page 13
