“Would you want to grab dinner with me sometime?” she finished, hoping her voice didn’t carry to whoever had just entered her shop.

“Oh,” James said in that same smooth voice that had been making Mary’s stomach flip for the last fifteen minutes. He took a step closer to her and tugged a hand through his hair. It was then that Mary saw the flash of gold. On his left hand.

Right. Rightrightrightrightright.

“When I said ex-wife,” he mumbled, his eyes flicking behind her toward the newcomer in the shop, “I probably should have said soon-to-be ex-wife. But we’re, yeah, in mediation and I probably shouldn’t...”

She refused to be the one who was embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. But she still couldn’t stop the flood of heat in her cheeks. And sure enough, here came the underboob sweat. Like freaking clockwork.

“Oh. Okay.” She rose up from where she’d been crouching to arrange the flowers, still holding a few of them in her hands. “That’s fine. Good luck with all that.”

James stepped forward. He seemed to be purposefully ignoring the other shopper. “I didn’t mean to mislead you or anything. You’re just so pretty and I was having such a bad day until you smiled at me.”

Ugh. Did he have to be so cute? “It’s totally fine. Good luck with everything!” She gave him a bright smile so that he wouldn’t continue this apology that was only allowing embarrassment to dig its claws more forcefully into her.

“Right,” he mumbled. “You too.” And then he ambled out of the shop, shooting Mary a fairly miserable look through the shop window as he went back the way he’d come.

Mary resisted the urge to crumple up into a raisin and die and turned to the new customer with a sunny smile on her face.

She’d once stood on a curb when a cab had driven past and splashed muddy puddle water all over her new Anthropologie skirt. This was pretty much the emotional equivalent of that.

Because standing in her shop was a sympathetic-looking Estrella and a bitingly disdainful-looking John, his elbow firmly in his mother’s grip.

The smile vaporized off Mary’s face and she just sort of stared at them. If there had been one person on God’s spinning earth that Mary would not have wanted to see her ask out a married man and be rejected, it would be John Modesto-Whitford. The memory of his surly judgment two nights ago was painfully fresh in Mary’s mind. She didn’t let that kind of thing get too under her skin, but this one definitely hadn’t quite healed over yet.