“And you’re not?” Noah asked. Juliet could tell that he was trying to get a clearer picture of the situation. “Married, that is?”
“No.” Cassandra seemed perfectly comfortable with the idea. She eased back against the couch and raised her brows at him. “Never. How about you?”
Juliet froze, then darted a glance at Noah. God, she’d never thought . . . never considered, even though she knew he’d been in Iraq and it wasn’t uncommon for young soldiers to marry their girl before deploying to a battle zone. Had he ever . . . ?
“Thought about it at twenty-one.” Noah’s expression was as noncommittal as before. “Then thought better of it.”
Juliet’s tight chest loosened, and wasn’t that just a warning in itself about the trouble a lonely widow could get into? What kind of person didn’t want the man living across the pool to have once fancied himself in love enough to marry?
She put the yarn and needles aside and got to her feet. “Maybe we should go.” New to this awake-and-in-the-world business, her emotional state was rocky, as these weird responses to Noah proved. She had her answers from Cassandra so it was time to leave.
“Good idea,” Noah said, rising. “But before we take off, Cassandra, I want to make something clear.”
Juliet’s donor sibling stood, too. “All right.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I have Juliet’s back.”
Juliet swallowed her groan. Great. Here they went. “Noah—”
“No matter where I am, no matter if it’s today, tomorrow, or ten years from now, I’m there,” he said over her protest. “Someone tries to take advantage of Juliet—whether it’s of her wallet or her heart—well, just understand I won’t stand by and let that happen. I’ll always be watching out for General Weston’s widow.”
General Weston’s widow
. Good lord, did Cassandra even know that’s who she was? Juliet thought. But of course she did. There was the Internet. Not to mention all the media attention during the last year. Cassandra would know as well as Noah that Juliet was the object of derision and suspicion by some.
And pity by others. Is that what Noah felt toward her? Is that why he’d just made his declaration?
“I understand,” Cassandra said. “And I’m glad my sister has such a loyal champion.”
Out of nowhere, tears burned the corners of Juliet’s eyes and she blinked them back. She didn’t need a protector, damn it, and despite what Noah claimed, he was only her temporary “champion” anyway. He would move on to his own life, and soon, just as she’d told him at the restaurant.
She swallowed, feeling a desperate need for fresh air. “Good-bye,” she told the other woman, already moving toward the door. Noah had his fingertips at the small of her back, even as she looked over her shoulder. “I’ll . . . I’ll talk to you, um, soon.” Caution, remember? No need to be more specific than that.
Cassandra’s smile was bright. But her eyes were, too. Bright with unshed tears that matched the ones Juliet felt gathering once more.
Just like that, her resolve broke. “Come to dinner,” Juliet urged. “The day after tomorrow. You and Nikki. Ask her.” Without even looking, she felt Noah’s dismay at her rash words.
“Are you sure . . .” the other woman started.
“I’m sure.” Of course, Juliet wasn’t, but she couldn’t make herself take back the invitation.
“All right,” Cassandra replied. “I’ll call Nikki.”
Noah had Juliet’s fingers now and was towing her out the door toward his truck. Even though she sensed his concern, she couldn’t help but appreciate the secure warmth of his clasp.
So be careful about Noah, too,
Juliet warned herself, trying to tug free of him. While it might be too soon with her sisters, it was too late to become attached to the man who held her hand.
Juliet surveyed the selection of cookbooks spread on the kitchen’s butcher-block island, and tried remembering her last impulsive action. If she didn’t count the act of inviting her sisters to dinner, before that there was . . . there was . . .
There was the night she’d decided to marry Wayne. When she was thirteen years old.
A rap on the glass of the French door behind her made Juliet spin around. Obscured by the mullions stood Noah, who had been repainting the flaking backyard gazebo for the past few hours. She gestured, and he swung open the door to step inside, bringing with him a blast of outdoor-scented air and the unsettling, electric presence of raw maleness.
Barefoot, Noah was dressed in a pair of ragged camouflage pants.
And nothing else.
So right there in the room with her were his uncovered powerful arms and shoulders, not to mention the rippling board of his abdomen. Above that, his naked chest, with all its muscular bends and fascinating dips. Pressing the small of her back against the edge of the island, she put more room between herself and his skin, though she couldn’t keep her gaze from inspecting every tanned inch. There was a streak of clay-colored paint under the curve of one pectoral, just three shades lighter than the hard-centered disc of his nipple.
She yanked her attention to his face, even as heated pinpricks washed from her nape to her heels. “What, um, what can I do for you?”
“I thought I heard the mail truck a while back.”
“Mmm. Yeah.” There was another scent in the air besides the green-and-fresh smell of the outdoors. She took it in, and then wished she hadn’t. The other olfactory note invading the kitchen was the toasty, soapy scent of a sun-drenched Noah and in a flash she saw herself putting her mouth to that smooth juncture of chest and shoulder and breathing him in, deep into her lungs. The tang of his sweat salty against her tongue.
“Ma’am?”
The polite prompt jarred her back to reality. Punishing herself by pushing back harder against the edge of the butcher block, she forced out a laugh. “ ‘Ma’am?’ You haven’t called me that since the first few weeks you came to work for Wayne.”
“I work for you, now,” he said. “Just trying to remind myself of that.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, bunching his pectoral muscles. “You’d appreciate if I wouldn’t what?” Noah asked. “Remember that ours is purely a boss-employee relationship?”
Those prickles burned another path down her torso and then reversed direction to rush toward her face. “Of course it’s boss-employee,” she reassured him. “I could do without the ‘ma’am,’ that’s all. Makes me feel a hundred years old.”
One side of his mouth kicked up and she stared at his lips. He hadn’t shaved, and the contrast of dark stubble to smooth skin only made it harder to look away. “Ah. It’s the older woman thing again.”
No. She didn’t care that she was older than he. Wasn’t it she who had pointed it out, after all?
And right now she didn’t feel older. Right now she just felt . . . different. Female to his male. Uncertain to that knowing gleam she thought she detected in his eyes.
With a whirl, she turned to her open cookbooks again. “The mail’s there in a stack by the sink. I haven’t yet separated yours from mine.”
“Then my
Playboy
renewal form is free from your prying eyes.”
She ignored the teasing gibe and left it to him to sort through the pieces. After a moment, though, the rustling ceased and she registered an odd, suspicious silence. Curious, she glanced over her shoulder.
Noah stood as if carved from stone, a manila envelope in his hands. Her gaze ran across the heavy bones of his shoulder blades and down the groove of his spine and she didn’t think he breathed.
“Noah?”
He didn’t respond, so she hurried to his side. Call her nosy, but she couldn’t stop herself from peering at the correspondence that had fixed his attention. “The California Bar? Noah, are these the results of your exam?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t supposed to come back until November.”
“Well, open it!”
He hesitated.
She jostled his elbow. “What are you waiting for?”
Sliding a glance at her, he gave a little smile. “You’ve never struck me as the impatient type. This is a whole new side of you, Juliet.”
“Yes, well, I’ve been surprising myself a lot just lately.” There was her sexuality, suddenly awake and somehow fixated on Noah, the man who’d just ma’amed her. And then there was that impetuosity she’d noted earlier, too. Clamoring desire and impulsive dinner invitations. “And I’m not sure I like the new me.”
“I think I do.” He tapped her nose with the envelope.
Tapped her nose with the envelope! Bubbles broke in her bloodstream, making her feel girlish and woozy and startled all over again. She shuffled back a step and his gaze returned to what he held in his hand.
He didn’t appear any more eager to open it than he had a minute ago.
“It’s a big moment,” she said. “Been a long time coming.”
He nodded. “Years.”
“Did you always want to go into law?”
“Nah. For a long time I didn’t have any direction at all. But there came a day . . .”
Curiosity got to her again. “There came a day . . . ?”
“Before they send you into a combat zone, the Army makes you write a death letter. You’re supposed to have them ready to be mailed to a loved one in case, well, you know. When I wrote mine, that’s when I started thinking about becoming a lawyer.”
Cold trickled down her spine. Death letter. “And yours was going to . . . ?”
“I didn’t know my mother’s address. She moves around a lot. But my dad’s I knew—he’d been in the same prison since before I enlisted.”
“Oh.” Well. She didn’t know quite how to respond to that. “You decided you wanted to be a defense attorney? So you could help get your father out of prison?”
He looked over at her and laughed. “Hell, no. I wanted to be one of the guys who could put a man like my free-with-his-fists father away a lot sooner. So it was going to be either law or order—and frankly, after three years in the infantry I’d had it with guns. Police work was out.”
Free-with-his-fists father
. “I don’t know what to say. It sounds like you had a rough childhood.”
“Yeah. You could call it that. You could call it—” But then he shrugged, his jaw tightening. “Never mind. I don’t want you to think about that. As a matter of fact, I’m damn sorry I mentioned it.”
As if somehow the knowledge soiled her. Juliet bristled. “Noah. Listen, I won’t faint if—”
The sound of the envelope ripping open swallowed the last of her words. He pulled out the papers inside and scanned the top one. “The board has a new scoring mechanism that enabled them to get the results back a month early—more in line with other states that generally return theirs in October. If the damn cable company hadn’t left us hanging, we’d already have Internet access and I would have known what was going on.”
Did he have ice in his veins? “Well, what
is
going on? Did you pass or didn’t you?”
He shuffled the sheets in his hands. Then his gaze met hers. “What do you know? It appears I did.”
His offhand tone didn’t match this kind of news. She had to replay the words in her head. Then ask again, just to be sure. “So you passed?”
“Yeah. I passed.”
Juliet stared. “You don’t seem all that thrilled,” she started, then light dawned. “I guess that means you’re not so surprised by the results.”
He shrugged, still Mr. Cool. “Not so much. It ends up that I’m pretty good at taking tests.”
“ ‘Not so much!’ ” She whacked the side of his arm with her hand. “ ‘Pretty good at taking tests.’ ” She whacked him again.
When he didn’t react, she grabbed his forearms and tried to shake him. “You could show some happiness here,” she said, smiling. “Excitement might even be in order. Noah, you did it!”
“You’re right. I did.”
But his slow-growing grin wasn’t good enough for her. “You really did it! Congratulations.” The moment called for a hug, and in keeping with her new habit, she went with impulse, throwing her arms around him.
And then it was just as she’d imagined. Her mouth at that smooth spot where chest met shoulder. His sunshine, soap, and sweat smell in her lungs, her tongue . . . her tongue she kept imprisoned behind her teeth, even as his arms came around her in a return embrace. The papers and the envelope fell around their feet.
She was so close she could hear the slam of his heart against his chest. The bubbles were dancing through her blood again, and the woozy was back, but there was nothing girlish inside of her now. Now it was a woman pressed against a strong, virile, healthy young man.
When was the last time she’d been held like this?
“Juliet.” Noah whispered the syllables against the top of her head and then let out a soft groan. “Oh, God.
Juliet
.”
Her head tipped back to look into his face, to see why he sounded so tortured. His blue eyes were fixed on hers, and the look in them wasn’t pained—it was a look that made her hot all over. Her nipples tightened and her thigh muscles clenched. Desire burned across her skin like a hot wind.
She should move away. Cautious Juliet would defuse the moment and then promptly forget it ever happened. But now, now she had that impulsiveness. She was reckless with that burn on her skin and that effervescence in her blood. And she couldn’t regret it, didn’t want to even worry about it, because she hadn’t felt alive like this in years.
His big hands came up to cradle her face as his head lowered. “So you know,” he said, his voice whispery-hoarse, his breath warm against her lips. “
Now
I’m excited.”
Four
War does not determine who is right—only who is left.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
Noah’s kiss wasn’t tentative or gentle or sweet, but as confident and masculine as the man himself. Against hers, his mouth was hot and hard. His whiskers scratched the skin surrounding Juliet’s lips.