“Right,” he said, blinking to alertness. “Plans. Well, okay, would you think I’m being a total cheeseball if I keep it a surprise?”
“Yes,” she said immediately. “But nobody ever said being a cheeseball was bad.”
He extended his arm to her with a grin. She looped her arm through his and, for a moment, everything between them just felt so right and so easy that it was almost impossible to imagine how they’d ever let things come between them.
Cadence figured out where they were going almost immediately. There simply were not that many restaurants in Magnolia Shore. But she gamely pretended she had no idea and exclaimed in delight when they pulled into the small parking lot for Captain’s Crest, a seaside restaurant with great seafood and even better views.
“No way,” she exclaimed. “I love Captain’s Crest.”
Tyler too, played along. “No way? Huh, what a great and totally random guess!”
They shared a grin and, again, there was that moment ofrightness.
Tyler turned off the car. “Okay, stay where you are though,” he said.
“Uh, what?”
Cadence, instead of receiving an answer, was left watching as Tyler hurried from his seat, closed the door, and jogged around to her side of the car.
Then he pulled open Cadence’s door and held out a hand to her.
She shot him a surprised, happy grin, and he shrugged.
“Thought I’d be a gentleman about it,” he said, a touch sheepish.
“Well, thank you.” She reached up and took his hand.
Inside, the ambiance in the restaurant was more romantic than Cadence remembered it. That, combined with Tyler’s sweetness and kindness, made her increasingly certain that thiswasa date.
She was surprised to find that she… kind of liked the idea.
It was better than a first date, actually, she decided a few minutes into their conversation, because she and Tyler didn’t have any of the awkward stop and starts that came from getting to know a new person. Instead, Tyler launched into a charismatic retelling of some of the zanier customers he’d encountered during his recent electrician jobs. They had both long since learned that working inside people’s homes meant seeing their quirks up close and personal.
“So this guy had, like, a hundred light switches in his house,” he said, rubbing his neck.
“No way,” Cadence said. “That’s too many.”
“Okay, I didn’t do a complete count, but I made it to like forty before I gave up. This guy had installed switches foreverything. And he’d done it all himself, so goodness only knows why, all of a sudden, he wanted a professional to handle the rewiring. Anyway, it was amess.”
Cadence was chuckling into her wine glass. She’d ordered a Bordeaux in anticipation of the seafood Alfredo she’d ordered. She’d always liked the earthy wine when paired with thick, creamy Alfredo sauce.
Tyler, meanwhile, had ordered an Old Fashioned, something she knew he considered a rare treat. She’d asked him once why he didn’t drink them more frequently, given how much he clearly enjoyed them, but he had countered that he enjoyed thembecausethey were special, not an everyday sort of thing.
She liked thinking that tonight was special.
“You always had the best work stories,” she said, shaking her head into her drink.
To her surprise, Tyler frowned at this.
“Cadence, I want to apologize,” he said somberly. “You talk about me having good work stories, but part of me feels like… like I was bringing work home.”
Cadence frowned. “We all bring work home sometimes, Ty,” she said gently. “That’s life.”
“Sure, but—” He dragged a hand through his hair, rumpling his locks. “I guess what I meant to say is that I throw myself into my work. And I’m not sorry about that. I like my job, and I like being good at it. And I recognize that working hard is what it takes to be good at it. So I don’t know why I didn’t realize until it was too late that I needed to work at being a husband too.”
The look he gave her was heartbreaking.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that it’s easy to forget. We read stories that end in ‘and they lived happily ever after’ and think, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to be.’ But that’s not real life. Real life is weird and complicated and hard.”
