LITMIR.BIZ

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punch was even more unexpected.

      It took a minute for his brain to absorb this startling bit of information that—at least for him—changed the whole equation.

      Zoe was married.

      He couldn’t have said why her revelation surprised him so much, or why it left him feeling oddly disappointed. He only knew that he needed to stop thinking of this woman as his sexy new neighbor and focus on the fact that she was someone’s wife.

      Damn.

      Zoe might not be his usual type, but he found himself drawn to her regardless. There was just something about her that intrigued him—enough so that, in the brief time between their first meeting that morning and his return for their scheduled appointment, he’d found himself looking forward to spending time with her, getting to know her. And maybe, eventually, moving toward a more intimate and personal relationship with her.

      Of course, that was all before he’d learned she was married.

      It was his own fault for letting his fantasies get ahead of him, and he silently cursed himself for that now. His hand dropped away and he took a step back.

      She gazed at him uncertainly as she folded her arms over her chest. Her cell phone was still clutched in her hand—her left hand. He noted that fact along with the absence of any rings on her fingers.

      “You don’t wear a wedding band,” he noted.

      Of course he knew that not everyone did. But he sensed that she was the type who would, that if she’d made a commitment to someone, she would display the evidence of that commitment. Then again, he’d been wrong about assuming she was uninvolved, so maybe he was wrong about this, too.

      She shook her head and moved back to the dining room, returning to the chair she’d vacated to answer the call. “No, I don’t wear a ring. Not anymore. Not since…that is, I’m—I mean we’re—getting a divorce.”

      “Oh,” he said, as he absorbed this second unexpected—but more welcome—revelation. And then he felt like a heel, because he was relieved to know that her marriage had fallen apart so that he didn’t need to feel guilty for fantasizing about a married woman.

      “We’re just waiting for the final papers to come through,” she admitted.

      “I’m sorry,” he said lamely.

      She shrugged. “It happens.”

      Yeah, he knew that it did. He also knew that a break-up was never as easy as she implied, even if it was the right choice.

      “How long were you married?” he asked.

      “Almost nine years.”

      He stared at the woman who didn’t look like she was twenty-five. “Did you get married while you were still in high school?”

      She smiled at that. “Fresh out of college.”

      “How old were you when you went to college?”

      “I’m twenty-nine,” she told him.

      And he was thirty-seven—which meant there weren’t as many years between them as he’d originally suspected, but there was still the barrier of her marriage. And even if her divorce papers came through tomorrow, she was obviously still hung up on her husband. Her evident distress over his phone call was proof of that.

      “What did your soon-to-be-ex-husband want?” he asked. “Did you take off with his coffeemaker or something like that?”

      “No, nothing like that. We actually had a very civilized settlement.”

      “Then why was he calling you now?”

      “He heard from a friend of mine that I bought a house and wanted to tell me he thought it was a mistake.”

      “Did you tell him it was none of his business?”

      “Yes,” she said. “But after nine years of marriage—and not just living together, but working together, too—some habits are hard to break.”

      “Is he a photographer, too?”

      “No. He’s the senior fashion editor at Images.”

      “Is that why you left Manhattan?”

      She shook her head. “It’s a big enough city that I could have stayed, found a new apartment, a new job, and probably have never seen him again if I didn’t want to. But everything just seemed so inexplicably woven together there. I needed to get away from all of it, to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

      “Well, you picked a good place for that.”

      “Speaking from experience?”

      His surprise must have shown, because she smiled.

      “Maybe I didn’t peg you quite as quickly as you did me,” she said, “but the more I listen to you talk, the more I hear just the subtlest hint of a drawl.”

      “You can take a boy out of the south, but you can’t take the south out of the boy,” he mused.

      “How far south?”

      “Beaufort, South Carolina.”

      “What brought you up here?”

      “I came north to go to college, met Nick Armstrong there, came to Pinehurst for a visit one summer and decided to stay up here to go into business with him.”

      “Do you go home very often?”

      “This is my home now.”

      “Don’t you have any family left in Beaufort?”

      He shook his head again. “There’s just me and my brother, Tyler, and he’s living up here now, too.”

      “No wife or ex-wife?” she wondered.

      He shuddered at the thought. “No.”

      “Well, that was definite enough.”

      “Not that I’m opposed to the institution of marriage. In fact, I was the best man when Nick got married.” He grinned. “Both times.”

      “He was married to someone before Jessica?”

      “To your real estate agent actually.”

      Now that came as a surprise to Zoe.

      “I don’t know Jessica very well, obviously,” she said. “But the way she talked about Nick, I got the impression they’d been together forever.”

      “They’ve been in love forever,” he agreed. “Had a brief romance when they were younger, then went their separate ways and found each other again only last year.”

      “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

      “It’s a small town,” he reminded her. “And Nick’s ex was remarried long before Jess ever came back to town.”

      Zoe thought about the possibility of Scott marrying again, and wondered if she could ever bring herself to be friends with her ex-husband’s new wife. Then she decided it was a moot point. He was out of her life; she’d moved away; they’d both moved on.

      She felt the familiar ache of loss, but it wasn’t as sharp or as strong as it once had been. She’d finally accepted that he couldn’t be what she’d needed him to be any more than she could be what he’d wanted. And while her body would always carry the scars of what had finally broken their marriage, she realized that her heart was finally starting to heal.

      

      Mason didn’t know anything about babies, but he couldn’t deny that the pink bundle in Jessica’s arms was kind of cute. Elizabeth Theresa Armstrong had soft blond fuzz on her head, tiny ears and an even tinier nose. She yawned, revealing toothless gums, then blinked and looked at her mother through the biggest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen.

      “She’s a beauty,

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