Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper
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times over the years when he’d thought about picking up the phone and calling Addy. She’d been his friend first, after all. But her marriage to Mark had shifted the balance of their relationship, redefined it. And then there had been that last, awful scene between Mark and him the night of their wedding. Nothing had been the same after that.
Even after he’d heard about their divorce, it felt as if too much time had passed for him to contact Addy, or maybe he still felt guilty for protecting Mark all those years ago.
“Is someone joining you?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Mind if I do?”
She met his gaze, held it in silence long enough to make him wonder if she might turn him down, then said, “I’d like that.”
“Let me just go tell these guys,” he said, hit with the inexplicable feeling that he was aimed for the edge of a cliff, and his brakes were about to fail.
CHAPTER THREE
HE WAS THE last person in the world Addy had imagined seeing in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel.
She watched him wind his way through the tables to the corner of the smoke filled bar where he’d said his friends were sitting. He looked different, and yet there was a sameness to him that was familiar and somehow comforting.
Culley.
She let the name settle over her, sink into an awareness that had been elbowed out of existence long ago.
They had grown up together, their mothers best friends, both of whom had once nurtured the idea of their children marrying the way some people cultivate prize-winning gardens.
But Addy had recognized early on that she and Culley were different. His bedroom walls had been lined with pictures of a half-dozen stars. Hers had a single picture of Tom Cruise, to whom she had remained faithful until her junior year when Mark started school in Harper’s Mill.
To Addy, Culley had been one of those guys who would never settle down, never be happy with one permanent relationship. Girls left their bras in his locker with their phone number written on a strap. She had teased him mercilessly about it, told herself she didn’t mind. The two of them had been friends since they were toddlers. And she had her own goals. On the day her father had walked out to make another family for himself, she had decided the man she eventually ended up with would be the kind of man who meant it when he said one and only, forever.
“Hi.”
He was back. She didn’t miss the interested glances of the two blondes sitting at the table across from them, both of whom looked as though they would have been all for leaving their bra with a room number written inside.
“Hi,” Addy said. “Sit down.”
He took the chair across from her, and she stole the unobserved moment to notice a few details about him. Short, dark-blond hair. A slash of jaw that, in her opinion, had always been the defining feature of his good looks. He was lean and fit, and she was glad to see that he had taken care of himself. That his need to push life’s limits had never taken him over the edge.
He looked up then, caught her staring. Gripped with sudden awkwardness, Addy anchored her hands around the wineglass in front of her and tried for a neutral smile. She didn’t need a mirror to know she’d failed.
He signaled a waiter who promptly stepped forward to take their drink order.
“What would you like, Addy?” Culley asked.
She tapped the edge of her glass. “I’m good for now.”
“A bottle of water for me, please,” he said to the waiter, who nodded and strode off in the direction of the bar.
His departure left behind another gulf of silence over which Culley’s gaze found hers, serious, a little intent.
“You look incredible, Addy.”
It was not what she’d expected him to say, but she was suddenly glad she’d bought the black dress even though it had no magical powers of transformation. She took a sip of her wine, finding it easier to let the compliment hover, than acknowledge it with a response.
The waiter reappeared with his water. Culley raised his glass and tapped it against the edge of hers. “To two old friends running into one another. A very nice surprise.”
She raised the glass to her lips and took a long sip. “Your mom told you about the divorce?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Her smile wavered. “Thanks.”
Culley reached across and covered her hand with his. “Are you all right?”
She couldn’t say anything, his touch surprising her, then suffusing her with a simultaneous rush of warmth and something way too close to gratitude. He turned her palm over, squeezed her hand tight, and she held on as if it were a lifeline, sure of nothing except that she didn’t want him to let go.
He didn’t.
He held on while he got up from his chair, and said, “Scoot over.”
She slid across the leather seat, and he settled in beside her. “Just when you think you know someone,” she said.
“So what happened?”
“Imagine the most boring cliché, and you’ll have the picture.”
He considered that, then said, “Were you having problems?”
“I didn’t think so, but looking back from here, I guess we were. I know what all the marriage manuals say. That when something like this happens, the affair isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.”
“Still hurts.”
She took another sip of wine. “That from personal experience?”
“Yep.”
“So what happened to yours?”
He looked down, but not before she saw the shadow cross his face. “That’s a story for another time.”
Addy’s gaze skittered away from his, settling on the next table over where an older couple had just been seated. In a booming voice, the man told their waiter that he and his wife were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary.
Culley glanced at them, a cloud of something that looked like sadness in his eyes. Not what she would have expected of the Culley Rutherford she had known in high school, Mark’s opposite, the one whose mission it was to play the field, steer clear of anything remotely hinting at commitment.
Addy pulled her hand from his and said, “Mama told me you took over Dr. Nettles’s practice.”
“Kind of surprised the whole town, I think.”
“No wonder, considering how you egged his car that Halloween.”
He smiled. “You know, he forgave me for that, but I think he tacked on a little extra anyway when I bought him out.”
Addy laughed. And the sound of it chipped away at a chunk of the ice frozen inside her. Simultaneously set up a small stir of appreciation for the presence of the man sitting next to her.
“Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself all these years,” he urged now.
“I graduated from college and woke up one day to find out I’d turned thirty. I think I billed out all the hours in between.”
He smiled. “What kind of law are you practicing?”
“Corporate.”
“Do you like what you do?”
“The rewards are good,” she said, not exactly answering the question.
Which he didn’t let her get away with. “But do you enjoy it?”
“It