I Want to Hold Your Hand

by Marie Force

  “True.”

  Cameron reached across the table for Hannah’s hand. “If you need a friend with you when you read Caleb’s journals, call me. I’ll come running.”

  Hannah squeezed Cameron’s hand. “Thank you for everything. I can totally see why my brother is crazy in love with you. I think I might be, too.”

  “She’s all mine, Hannah,” Will said. “Back off.”

  “Now, children, don’t fight,” Cameron said as they gathered their belongings and left the diner. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”

  CHAPTER 13

  We’re engaged! I’m so excited I can’t even breathe! That’s why he’s been acting so strange. He was nervous about the proposal. He asked me when we were on the porch swing at his grandmother’s house. It was perfect because he knows I love that house as much as he does! We’re going to get married right after graduation. Our life is going to be the most incredible adventure. I can’t wait!

  —From the diary of Hannah Abbott, age twenty-two

  As she followed Will and Cameron, Hannah saw Megan glare at the hand sitting possessively on Cameron’s lower back as Will guided her through the door. If it was true that Hunter had feelings for Megan, he faced an uphill battle in getting her to redirect her affections.

  Outside, Will and Cameron had stopped short at the sight of Fred, the town moose, ambling toward Cameron’s bright red Mini Cooper, which was parked in front of the diner.

  “I swear to God, if he so much as looks at my car, I’m going to have him made into a very large purse,” Cameron muttered under her breath.

  “Don’t speak that way about Fred,” Will said in mock horror.

  “I thought it was bulls who had a thing for the color red,” Cameron said.

  “Apparently moose do, too,” Hannah said, trying desperately not to laugh as Fred came closer and closer to Cameron’s tiny car.

  “Do you think he’s still mad about me crashing into him?” Cameron asked, sounding nervous now.

  “He’s never been known to be particularly vindictive,” Will said, “but you did hit him awfully hard.”

  Cameron took a step back, and Will’s hands on her shoulders kept her from tripping over his size-thirteen boot. “Make him stop!”

  “Right,” Will said, laughing. “As if anyone tells Fred what to do.”

  “My insurance company will never cover a second mooseastrophy,” Cameron said. “I was lucky they covered the first one.”

  Hannah stepped forward. “Hi, Fred.”

  The moose’s large milk-chocolate eyes shifted from Cameron’s car to the hand Hannah held out to him.

  “You don’t want to hurt Cameron’s car, now do you? She didn’t mean to hit you.” As she spoke to the huge animal, she noticed a crowd had formed on the sidewalk in front of the diner and across the street on the porch at the store. “Why don’t you head on home now? Okay?”

  Fred seemed to think it over for a minute before he let out a big moo that launched Cameron right off her feet into Will’s arms. Fred pawed the ground with a giant hoof and then started slowly down Elm Street on his way out of town.

  “Oh my God,” Cameron said. “You’re a moose whisperer!”

  “Seriously, Han,” Will said. “That was awesome. I had no idea you and Fred were so close.”

  “Neither did I,” Hannah said as her heart rate slowed to a more normal beat after the rush of adrenaline that came with facing off with Fred.

  Will nudged Cameron toward her car. “Let’s get your car to the dealer for a trade-in before Fred changes his mind and comes back.”

  “I’m getting a different color this time.” Cameron handed him the keys. “You’d better drive. My hands are still shaking.”

  Hannah watched them drive off, waving as they went by.

  “That was totally hot,” a deep male voice said against her ear.

  She spun around and found Nolan standing behind her. “Where’d you come from?”

  • • •

  After a nearly sleepless night following the confrontation with his father, Nolan had arrived at the garage feeling out of sorts and cranky. Because he’d fallen behind yesterday, he got right to work on two oil changes, a tire rotation and a brake job. It was all routine stuff, so he could do it without thinking. Unfortunately, that gave him far too much time to obsess about how the sweet pleasure of his evening with Hannah had given way to ugliness with his father.

  Skeeter came stumbling in around ten, looking as sleep deprived as Nolan felt and holding two large cups of coffee. He handed one of them to Nolan who accepted it with a grateful nod.

  Through bloodshot eyes, Skeeter took a closer look at Nolan. “What’s a matter with you?”

  “Nothing. What’s a matter with you?”

  “Not a darned thing,” Skeeter said with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile full of pure male satisfaction.

  Nolan couldn’t bear to think about what had him so satisfied. Ever since Skeeter had started seeing Dude, or whatever it was you’d call what the two of them were doing together, he’d walked around with a sleepy, dopey look on his face and had the need to share details that made Nolan want to find the highest cliff to jump from.

  “Heard Vernon was poking around town yesterday.”

  Nolan’s shoulders stiffened at the mention of his father’s name.

  “You see any sign of him?”

  He took a drink of coffee and said a silent prayer of thanks to the god of caffeine, who was going to get him through what promised to be an endless day. “Maybe.”

  “Aw, fuck, Nolan. What’d he want?”

  “What does he always want?”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “I gave him what I had on me, which wasn’t much.”

  “One of these times, you need to say no.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I know, boy,” Skeeter said with a deep sigh. “You never want to talk about it.”

  Because he couldn’t deny that, he did what he always did when things became too much for him—he worked like a demon. He worked straight through lunch and into the afternoon before lightheadedness set in, reminding him he needed to eat.

  “I’m going to hit the diner,” Nolan said to Skeeter after he’d thoroughly washed his hands. “You want anything?”

  “Wouldn’t say no to a BLT on wheat.”

  “Okay.”

  Nolan had emerged from the garage to find Hannah staring down Fred, and his heart had literally stopped at the sight of her relatively tiny body standing before the huge animal. It took everything he had not to run over and get between her and Fred, but Fred had saved him the trouble by strolling off as if he had not a care in the world.

  Once the panic subsided, Nolan walked directly to Hannah, drawn to her in a way he’d never been to anyone else.

  When she asked him where he’d come from, he gestured to the garage. “Forgot to eat.”

  Her gaze coasted over his face. “You look exhausted. Is everything okay?”

  “It is now.”

  She smiled, and he felt a thousand times better. That was all it took. Christ, he had it bad for her, and it seemed to be getting worse all the time. And then he remembered the things he was keeping from her—including his passion for fast and risky driving as well as his deadbeat father—and the agonizing fear that he wasn’t good enough for her sucked the wind from his lungs.

  “Nolan? Are you okay? You really need to eat.” She took him by the arm and pulled him toward the diner. “Come on.”

  As he followed her up the stairs, her hand still on his arm, it occurred to him that she was making a rather public declaration by dragging him into the diner. He discovered he quite liked her public declaration, even if his stomach ached with more than just hunger. After spending even a little time with her, after holding her and kissing her and touching her soft skin, he couldn’t imagine going back to the empty life he’d been leading before her.

  But the second he told
her about his high-stakes passion or let her into the nightmare that was his family, he’d lose her. He had almost no doubt about that, and the thought depressed him more than anything had in a long time.

  “What’s troubling you?” she asked when they were seated in a booth.

  He wanted to reach for her hands, but wasn’t sure she was ready to go that public, so he resisted. “Nothing now.”

  “How about before?”

  “Could we maybe talk about it later? I’ve had a bitchy day until about five minutes ago, and all I want to do is sit here and look at you. Is that okay?”

  She blushed as she nodded, and under the table, her hand curled around his. “Does this help?”

  “Yeah,” he said gruffly. Her touch affected him so profoundly that all he could do was gaze at her, drinking in every detail of her face, focusing primarily on the rosy pink lips that were still a bit swollen from their passionate kisses the night before. Longing zipped through him and had him shifting in his seat to accommodate the sudden pressure against his fly. He released a shaky breath as Megan approached the table to take their order.

  Nolan asked for a cheeseburger and fries as well as Skeeter’s BLT to go.

  “Just a Diet Coke for me,” Hannah said.

  “You don’t want anything to eat?” Nolan asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ll steal a few of your fries.”

  He held her hand between both of his as he continued to stare greedily at her. “We’re kind of going public here,” he whispered, aware of the attention they were generating from other patrons.

  “That’s okay,” she said with a hint of hesitation that he tuned right in to.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I . . . Sometimes I wonder . . . What people will think of me if I start to date again.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Everyone has been so kind to me since Caleb died, and I know it’s weird, but I worry about letting them down or something.” She glanced up at him, slaying him with her expressive eyes. “That’s stupid, right?”

  “It’s not stupid. You want them to respect you, and you want them to know you still respect Caleb and his memory.”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding relieved. “That’s it exactly. Speaking of his memory . . .” Hannah told him about the retreat she planned to open at the house and showed him the logo Cameron had left with her.

  He studied the picture for a long moment. “Won’t this tell the world that he’s still very much on your mind?”

  “I suppose it will.”

  “People know you haven’t forgotten him, Hannah. How could you? How could any of us ever forget him?”

  On the other side of the diner, Percy Flanders and Cletus Wagner, best friends of Hannah’s grandfather, watched them closely. At one point, Cletus leaned over to catch a glimpse of what was going on under the table. Upon righting himself, he raised a nosy white eyebrow in Nolan’s direction.

  “Do you want me to let go?” he asked, aware that she’d noticed the attention from the old men.

  “No.”

  “I wish I had the balls to lean across this table and kiss you.”

  Her nervous laughter further inflamed him. He wanted her so fiercely. “It might be best to save that for a more private setting.”

  He groaned at her suggestive words and was forced to release her hand when his lunch landed with a clatter on the table. “What’s her problem?” he asked after Megan stormed off.

  “She’s mad at me.”

  He doused the burger and fries with ketchup. “At you? Why?”

  “Because I’m friends with Cameron.”

  “Still not getting it.”

  “Megan is madly in love with Will, or at least she has herself convinced she is.”

  Nolan paused with a fry halfway to his mouth. “Megan is in love with Will? Since when?”

  “Um, pretty much forever.”

  “Seriously? Wow, I totally missed that one. So she hates Cameron.”

  “Naturally. And she hates me because I love Cameron.”

  “Yikes. That’s a whole lot of hate going around.”

  “I know! It’s so silly—and get this. I heard this morning that Hunter actually has a thing for Megan.”

  “Hunter as in your twin brother Hunter?”

  Exasperated, she said, “Yes, my twin brother. What other Hunter do you know?”

  “I figured it had to be some other Hunter, because I so don’t see him with her.”

  “Me either, especially when she’s so flagrant about her feelings for Will. Poor Hunter. And in other Abbott news, apparently Colton has a girlfriend.” She leaned in closer to whisper. “He shaved off his beard and cut his hair.”

  “All of this just since I last saw you?”

  “It’s been a busy day.”

  “I’d say so.”

  She dipped one of his fries into ketchup and popped it into her mouth. “So what’s your meeting tonight about?” All at once, she seemed uncertain. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “You’re not prying. You’re interested. There’s a difference. And I want to tell you about my meeting, but that’s a whole separate conversation we need to have very soon.”

  “Is it an AA meeting?” She quickly added, “If it is, that’s okay.”

  Laughing, he said, “No, nothing like that. It’s an addiction of another kind.”

  “I confess to being intrigued.”

  She wouldn’t be intrigued once she heard how he liked to spend his free time. She’d most likely be horrified and never want to see him again.

  Her hand covered his—on top of the table this time. “Whatever it is, I want to hear about it. I want to know you, Nolan.”

  “And what if you don’t like what you learn about me?”

  “I suppose we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. So far, I like everything I know about you.”

  “Everything?”

  She nodded as she gazed intently at him. “Uh-huh.”

  He quickly finished his lunch and signaled for the check, which he paid with haste, and picked up the bag with Skeeter’s takeout. “You left something important in my office yesterday. You should come and get it.”

  Hannah’s brows came together in an adorably confused expression. “What did I leave?”

  “I’ll show you when we get there. Come on.”

  • • •

  Excited, confused, intrigued and aroused by his obvious desire to be alone with her, Hannah walked quickly to keep up with him. He kept a tight hold on her hand as they moved briskly on the sidewalk, attracting the attention of several passers-by, who nodded in greeting to her.

  At the garage, Nolan dropped the white bag containing the BLT on top of a tall red tool chest. “There’s your sandwich,” he called to Skeeter.

  “Hey, boss, Mrs. Andersen called while you were gone—”

  “Take a message.”

  “I did. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Tell me later.” Nolan slammed the office door in Skeeter’s bemused face.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” Hannah said.

  Like the day before, he pinned her to the door with the weight of his big body pressed against her. “I’ll apologize later.” He tipped his head and dropped a series of kisses along the column of her neck. “I’m addicted to the way you smell, the way you taste.” He dragged his tongue lightly over her neck, making her shudder.

  With her fingers curled into his belt loops, she held on for dear life as she felt the sharp bite of his teeth. She gasped and arched against him, desperate for more.

  “His truck is here,” a familiar voice said from the outer office. “I know he’s here somewhere.”

  “Um, I wouldn’t go in there,” Skeeter said. “He’s . . . um . . . busy.”

  “Goddamn it,” Nolan whispered.

  “Is that Mrs. Andersen?” Hannah whispered back.

  “The one and only. She’s an auto-
hypochondriac. Always thinks something is wrong with her car and nothing ever is.”

  “She’s got a crush on you.”

  He drew back from her. “What?”

  “That’s why she makes up problems with her car—so she can see you.”

  “That is so not true.”

  Smiling, Hannah tugged him by the hair, urging him to kiss her while he still could.

  As his lips slid over hers, a loud pounding sounded on the door. “Nolan! It’s Mrs. Andersen. I need to speak with you about Sadie.”

  “The car has a name?” Hannah whispered.

  He rolled his eyes.

  Hannah snuggled tighter against the erection that pulsed against her stomach, drawing a tortured gasp from him.

  “Maybe I can help you,” Skeeter said.

  “I don’t want you,” Mrs. Anderson said disdainfully. “I want him.”

  “Told you,” Hannah whispered.

  Groaning in frustration, Nolan stepped back from her and ran his fingers repeatedly through his hair, as if trying to regain his sanity. “We’re still on for tonight, right?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll see you after your meeting.”

  He sat back against the desk, gazing at her.

  “So what did I leave here yesterday?”

  “Me.”

  Smiling, she crossed the small space to him, stepped between his outstretched legs and put her arms around his neck. “You were right. That was something important.”

  “Is it later yet?” he asked with a sigh.

  “Not yet, but it’ll be here before you know it, and I’ll be ready.”

  He nuzzled a sensitive spot by her ear, setting off a series of tremors that had her nipples tightening. “Don’t forget the jeans.”

  “They’re in the dryer as we speak.”

  After a groan filled with anticipation and one last tight squeeze, Nolan let her go. “See you soon.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “Poor Mrs. Anderson. She’ll be crushed when she sees you come out of here.”

  Hannah patted his face. “Let her down easy, and tell her you’re taken.”

  He surprised her when he took hold of her hand and touched his lips to her palm. Looking up at her, he said, “Am I?”