Well Matched (Well Met #3)(75)

I got it now. I understood why Emily did this every summer, and how it had become such a part of my friends’ lives. Dressed like this, with my hair braided and my skirts hiding my sneakers, wrapped in the arms of a strapping-looking, kilted faux Highlander, I didn’t feel like a fortysomething single mother. I wasn’t introverted me at all. I was someone who got to do this. Who got to stroll through the trees with the guy she liked, subsist on frozen lemonade and funnel cakes, and live in a world where swords and kilts and knights on horseback were an everyday thing. No nosy neighbors or judgy mothers. No lists of women in his phone. No decade of years between us. No leaving town.

I was someone who got to sit here in the shade, nestled against Mitch’s side, his heart beating under my ear and the rise and fall of his chest against my cheek. Yes, I could see the appeal of this. In being someone else. Because in this moment, all I wanted to be was this woman in his arms.

Onstage, the teenage Beatrice and Benedick had stopped their bickering and had fallen in love. The girl was sitting on a rough-hewn bench, the boy kneeling at her feet, his voice earnest. “I do love nothing in the world so much as you: is that not strange?”

The words hit me full in the chest, where I felt something shift. That wall around my heart had never felt so precarious. “Is that not strange?” I repeated in a whisper, dashing away a tear that had sprung to the corner of my eye.

“Hmm?” Mitch glanced down at me, his face softening as he took in whatever expression was on my face.

I shook my head and patted his thigh, enjoying the way the muscle felt beneath the kilt despite those infuriating bike shorts he wore. “Nothing.” I left my hand where it was. His arm tightened around me and I remembered the most wonderful thing: Caitlin wasn’t going to be home tonight.

“What are you doing after this?” I whispered, still looking ahead at the stage.

“Going out, like always,” he said with a general lack of enthusiasm. Or maybe he was just being polite and staying quiet because the show was still going on. “Why?”

“Oh, no reason. It’s just that I’m home alone tonight.”

He froze, muscles tensing. I continued talking like I didn’t notice. “So I was wondering if you . . .” I let the sentence trail off while my heart pounded in my throat. Was I really going to do this? But it wasn’t me inviting Mitch over, was it? It was the woman who wore this dress. And she was a lot more fun than I was.

“Oh,” he said. Then his eyes went wide. “Oh. Well.” He cleared his throat quietly and shifted a little on the bench. His fingertips had found the slice of skin between my drop-shouldered underdress and bodice, and he drew little circles there. “I mean, going out isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Especially if staying in with you is an option.”

My shrug was a slight twitch of my shoulders, an excuse to snuggle more into him. “I don’t have anything exciting planned. Maybe just order some takeout and . . .”

“I bet we can think of something.” He was still murmuring in my ear, but his voice had dropped an octave, going a little gravelly, and I felt it all the way down in my bones. “Maybe something involving attachments?”

I snorted a laugh that tried to be scandalized, but that was an emotion for someone else, not the woman in this dress. Instead I gave his thigh a squeeze. “I think I can guarantee that.”

Onstage, the girl was saying to the boy, “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest,” and I felt that down in my bones too.





Nineteen





The magic of being the woman in this dress ran out about halfway home. Probably because I had to unlace the bodice before I could comfortably sit behind the wheel to drive, and the magic drained out that way. Whatever it was, by the time I pulled into my neighborhood I was practically vibrating with tension. I could picture Marjorie, Caroline, everyone from book club and everyone who’d ever gossiped about the single mother who lived on the block, all of them looking out their windows. Clucking their tongues over how I was dressed, raising their eyebrows when that bright red truck showed up again in my driveway. And, if everything went well tonight, when it was there the next morning.

This may have been a terrible idea.

I turned onto my street and weighed the lesser of two evils. Decision made, I opened the garage door but parked on the far left side of my driveway, risking the thirty-second walk of shame in a fairy-tale gown from the car to the front door. Once inside I dug out my phone and texted Mitch.

I’ll leave the garage door open for you, if you can park in there.

The message was marked Read almost right away, but it was a couple minutes before he texted back.

Okay. But do me a favor. Don’t order dinner yet.

As requests went, that was pretty innocuous. Sure. Still deciding what you want?

I know what I want. Food can wait. Even through the screen his innuendo was clear, and I felt my blood heat up in response. I dropped my phone to the counter like it had burned me.

A few minutes later I heard the rumble of a truck engine, loud in my garage. As the engine cut off I slipped through the door in the kitchen, hitting the button to close the garage door as Mitch got out of his truck. The garage door rattled down, and we were sealed in the semidarkness, safe from prying eyes.

Mitch’s eyes met mine across the hood of his truck in the dim light of the garage, and I caught my breath. He looked . . . predatory, and with each step he took toward me I stepped back, until we were both in the kitchen and he’d closed the door behind us. His approach continued; I was backed up against the kitchen island and his eyes darkened as he closed the space between us. He reached out and traced his fingertips down my loosened bodice.