Carolyn Duff didn’t do discomfited. She never felt out of sorts.
“I’m buying toys for one of the children in the charity—” She glanced down at his cart and saw toys. Books.
“Me, too. I think the entire Lawford legal community got onboard with this one,” he said. “But maybe I should have stuck to business law. I haven’t the foggiest idea what the hell I’m doing.” He reached into his cart and pulled out the two dolls. “Burps or cries? Which is better? How am I supposed to know? To me, they’re both losing propositions.”
She laughed and when she did, it resurrected a part of her she’d thought she left behind long ago. A lightness she’d lost in the years she’d lived with her aunt Greta, then rediscovered when she’d met Nick.
A lightness she’d missed in the heavy work of being a city prosecutor.
She glanced at Nick. The poor man clearly had no clue when it came to kids—and neither did she. The two of them were stuck in the same shopping hell. What harm could come from a little talking? “I know exactly how you feel. I was standing in the next aisle with the same problem.” She reached into her cart and pulled out a selection of trucks. “Fire engine or police car? Dump truck or…what is this thing? A front loader? And what is a front loader anyway? And then there’s these things called transformers, but I can’t figure out why anyone would want a toy that transforms, or if it’s even what this boy would want.” Carolyn tossed the toys back into her cart and threw up her hands. She was babbling. She always did that when she got nervous—something that only seemed to happen outside the courtroom, and apparently whenever she got around Nick, who was a six-foot-two reminder of her biggest mistake. “Whatever happened to a bat, a ball and a catcher’s mitt?”
Nick chuckled. “It has gotten complicated, hasn’t it? Every single thing I see here has a computer chip in it, I swear. These aren’t just toys, they’re technological revolutions.” Nick shook his head. “Well, I’ll muddle through somehow. After all, I’ve got a college degree. How hard can it be? Just watch me.” He chuckled, showing the easy humor that had always been as much a part of Nick as his dark-brown hair and his cobalt eyes.
Did he remember that crazy decision to rush off to Vegas? The heady choice they’d made? One where they’d clearly not been thinking with brain cells, and only with the blush of lust?
Carolyn, out of Aunt Greta’s house for the first time since she was nine, so desperate to cast off the strangling structure of her past, saw escape in Nick. She’d married him for all the wrong reasons and had at least been smart enough to undo it the first chance she got.
Nick leaned forward, reading the boxes that lined the shelves, studying the facts and figures, researching his purchase. He was being the detail man that made him a good lawyer, but betraying none of the funny, spontaneous Nick she’d once known. Just as well. She didn’t need that man in her life. Because that man was the one who had—for a snippet of time—made her think she could be someone she really wasn’t.
“This says ages eight and up,” Nick read aloud, sounding as serious as a tax accountant. “I don’t think that will work. My paper says the child is six.”
“My—” She caught herself before she said “my child,” because this wasn’t her child. “The child I’m sponsoring is almost the same age. I have a five-year-old.”
“Someone wasn’t thinking. Giving you and me a couple of little kids like that. They should have assigned us two high school students. That we can handle. Buy them a couple calculators and some dictionaries. Sit them down, dispense some college advice.”
“Yeah.” She let out a little laugh. An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them, the kind that came from two people who used to know each other and now didn’t, who were pretending everything was cool—even when a heat still simmered in the air.
Leave, her mind said. Take this pause as what it was—an excuse to go. But her feet didn’t go anywhere and she couldn’t have said why.
“Maybe you should try this one.” Carolyn picked up a box that held a big white plastic horse designed for a doll to take galloping into the sunset. She flipped over the box, read the same age recommendation as Nick had seen and put it back on the shelf. That was all they needed—a choking lawsuit. “Forget it. Too many small parts.”
He gave her a smile. “When did you get so smart about toys?”
“I didn’t. It’s the lawyer in me reading the fine print.”
“You always were good at that part.”
Carolyn let those words go, knowing Nick meant more than the directions on a box. She’d been the strict one, always playing by the rules, where he’d been the opposite.
“What’s your kid’s name?” Nick asked, strolling further down the aisle, toward the dress-up clothes.
“Name?” Carolyn looked at him.
“Yeah. His or her name.”
“Uh…” Carolyn thought for a second. “Bobby.”
Nick grinned, and when he did, Carolyn was whisked back to those college days. “Nice name. My child is named Angela.”
“Your…your child? You’re married?”
“Are you kidding me? Could you see me with kids?” He chuckled. “You know me, Carolyn. I’m not the kind of guy who likes to have ties.”
That had been part of the attraction and part of the problem. Carolyn had gone for Nick because he’d been the complete opposite of the life she’d left in Boston, but when she’d needed him to be dependable, to listen, to be a true partner—
He hadn’t been there. He’d let her down.
“No, I never married again,” Nick went on. “Angela is the child I’m sponsoring.”
Carolyn released a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. Nick wasn’t married. He didn’t have kids. No other woman had laid claim to his heart.
She shouldn’t care. The days when she had any stake in Nick—or in anything about Nick—were long past.
“So, nope, no kids for me. This is as close as I get.” He gestured toward the basket of toys.
“A one-day commitment, huh?”
“Those seem to be the kind I’m good at.” Nick’s gaze met hers, and their shared history unfurled in the tension thickening the air between them.
A mother with two children, one strapped into the shopping cart’s seat, the other trailing behind and whining discontent about some toy she’d been denied, squeezed past them. On the overhead sound system, someone called for a price check in aisle three. Once again, the uncomfortable silence of two people who had essentially become strangers grew between Carolyn and Nick, like a tangle of thorny vines separating once-friendly neighbors.
“Well, it was great seeing you, Nick,” Carolyn said. “Good luck with your shopping.”
Before she could turn away, Nick reached out and laid a hand on top of hers. Carolyn took in a breath, the air searing her lungs, awareness pumping through her veins. Nick’s touch, so familiar, yet also so new after all this time apart, spread warmth through her hand. The scent of his cologne—the same cologne, as if nothing had changed, not a single thing. The sound of his heartbeat, his every breath—could she really hear that, or was it just her own, matching his?—time stopping for one, long slow second. “Wait. Don’t go,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why don’t we shop together?”
The mother and two children disappeared around the corner, the whine of the eldest child dropping off when she apparently spied a better toy. The store’s music droned on with its instrumental rendition of Seventies hits,