Malene winked at me. “You got it, kiddo. It’s the good kind of icing—the kind that has a little crunch.”
“Where is it?” I said, almost too excitedly.
Malene nodded toward the table where the ladies had deposited their handbags. I quickly spotted the foil-covered dish and nabbed it before Malene changed her mind. “Thank you, I’ll bring back the dish.”
Malene smiled like a Cheshire cat. “I know you will, dear. I know you will.”
Chapter 5
“This is really nice, Shane. Really nice.”
Shane and I sat behind a small bonfire that he’d built on top of a bluff. Beyond the fire, trees swayed from the forest floor—tall pines, oaks and poplars. The bluff was high enough that we were nearly eye level with the tops of the pines. Watching them sway had almost a dizzying effect.
Lady darted among the grass, trying to find crickets that chirped.
“Be careful, Lady,” I cautioned. “Stay close.”
She gave me a side-eye glance before heading off into a thick patch of grass.
Shane threw a log on the fire. “You promise that you’re not just pretending to like it?”
I huddled under a blanket that he’d given me. “It’s amazing. Really and truly beautiful.”
He pointed to the sky. “Sit out here long enough and we should be able to see shooting stars.”
“I don’t recall the last time I watched one.”
He smiled, his eyes shining. “Then maybe it’s about time you remember.”
The way the words slipped from his lips surprised me. Shane and I had always been friends, but this new attention was something that I didn’t know how to take.
I snuggled down into the canvas chair and eyed him shyly. The angle of his face as he stared at the fire highlighted how handsome he was—as if it were possible for him to be more good-looking.
I licked my lips. “Can I ask you something?”
He stoked the logs. “Sure.”
“I was surprised when you asked me here tonight,” I said. Ugh, how I hated to do this, but I had to know what was going on with him. “I thought that you were seeing someone.”
“I was.” He paused, considering his words. “We broke it off a couple of weeks back. It just wasn’t the right thing for me.”
The way he looked at me made my heart jump. This was so strange. We’d never gotten together before, I guess because usually one of us was casually seeing someone else—him more than me.
Ugh. Dating. I hated it. It seemed like all the guys who asked me out were either ten years too young for my thirty-three, or they were forty years my senior. I’d arrived in Peachwood at twenty-eight, and in small towns like this one, most folks were married by then—men and women. I had dated a few guys. They were nice, but none of them ever lit me up.
Shane was about the only person who did, and he was always seeing someone, but never too seriously—at least according to Malene. He didn’t strike me as the type to be serious.
Maybe I wasn’t the serious type, either.
“So you never settled down,” Shane said suggestively.
And here it was…the question as to why I wasn’t married. “I’ve never met anybody I wanted to settle with, I guess.” Totally true, and somewhat of a lie.
My mind flashed to that night in a bar, when I met him, the man who’d made it hard for me to trust any other man alive.
Shane settled back onto his chair and stared into the flames. “You know, I was hurt real bad once, by my high school sweetheart. I thought we’d get married. Thought we’d have kids, the whole thing.”
Here it was—Shane’s wound, whatever had stopped him in the past from committing to anyone. “What happened with her?”
