Unravel Me

by Christie Ridgway

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 im
pulse, 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.

  I shouldn’t . . . sailed across her mind, but then fell right over the edge of her consciousness, shoved aside by all things Noah.

  His sun-and-man scent.

  The breadth of his chest in the circle of her arms.

  The warm, sure thrust of his tongue.

  She gasped, drawing him farther into her mouth, and his fingers cupping her face tightened, biting into her scalp. It was all so real, so here-and-now, so corporeal.

  So much different than cold sheets and quiet memories.

  She pressed harder against his solid heat, and felt his body shudder. An answering shiver shot down her spine as pleasure softened her knees.

  Who could ever want this to stop?

  “Juliet? Hello!” The rattle of the front door closing followed the woman’s voice. “Juliet?”

  Noah jerked back, breaking their embrace. Ducking her head, Juliet put her feet in reverse, too, her hand coming up to cover her burning lips.

  “Juliet?”

  “In here.” She coughed to clear her clogged throat, and didn’t know whether to curse or bless herself for leaving the door unlocked after retrieving the mail. “The kitchen, Marlys. I’m in the kitchen.”

  Her husband’s dark-haired, twenty-five-year-old daughter entered the room with all the jerky speed and tightly wound energy she brought to every task. “What’s up?” She dumped the large cardboard box she was carrying onto the butcher block, heedless of the arrayed cookbooks. Her gaze flicked from Juliet to Noah, who was squatting on the ground to retrieve the scattered papers from the California Bar.

  Marlys’s lip curled in what was more sneer than smile. “Hey, Private,” she said. It was an obvious put-down instead of a personal nickname, and everyone in the room knew it. For whatever reason, early on she’d taken a dislike to the man who did so much for her father. Wayne’s death hadn’t changed her attitude one whit.

  Noah ignored it, as he always did. “Marlys,” he said, nodding in her direction as he came to his feet. “I’ll talk to you later, Juliet.”

  “Okay. Later.” Her view of his back didn’t give a clue as to how he was feeling. Or how she should be feeling now that their scorching moment was over. Or what she should do or say when “later” came about.

  Closing her eyes, she rubbed her temples with her fingers.

  “You look like crap,” Marlys observed, with her usual tact.

  Juliet lifted her lashes to stare at her husband’s daughter. “Gee, thanks.”

  The other woman wasn’t deterred by her dry tone. “Really. You should try combing your hair and using a little powder. You’ve got a rat’s nest going on there and your face is too pink.”

  But Juliet had bigger worries than what the kiss had done to her appearance—such as what she was going to do about the kiss. “It’ll be simpler if I just wear a sign when I venture out in public. ‘Not Looking My Best.’ ”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. Frankly, nobody expects widows to be candidates for InStyle.”

  “Right.” But at the mention of the magazine, her gaze sharpened on Marlys. With sleek hair and dark eyes, she was gymnast-sized and sprite-tempered. As the owner of a successful boutique in Santa Monica, she made a living out of looking like a fashion layout.

  Today, though, she was in boy-styled jeans with rips at the knees and a sweatshirt that read “Bayridge Bengals.” “Marlys? Have you been digging into the boxes of your old junior high clothes?”

  When she shrugged, the overstretched neckline of her sweatshirt slid to reveal some of her olive-skinned shoulder. “Last night I might have been rummaging through some stuff I dragged down from the attic.”

  “Oh, Marlys,” Juliet said, though she wasn’t surprised. The house in Pacific Palisades had belonged, originally, to Wayne’s parents. Though the time had felt right for her to move out and leave it to Wayne’s daughter, it didn’t seem healthy for the younger woman to use her new solitude as an unfettered opportunity to fixate on the past. In the months since the funeral, she’d often found Marlys sifting through cartons of military memorabilia as well as even less worthy flotsam of Weston family life.

  Despite Juliet’s best efforts, she’d never been close to Marlys. But because of her love for her husband, she couldn’t overlook the old clothes or the shadows under his daughter’s eyes. “Have you been sleeping?”

  Another shrug.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be rattling around that big house,” Juliet started. “Maybe you should think about sell—”

  “No.” The word was fierce. “Maybe you can walk away so easily, but I can’t. I won’t.”

  Grrrr. Juliet wanted to smack her forehead against the nearest countertop. Marlys never once gave her a break. Of course it hadn’t been easy for her to leave the house where she’d spent her married life. Of course it hadn’t been easy for her to . . .

  ... kiss another man. The moment caught up with her in Technicolor, with surround sound and full tactile memory. Noah’s muscles, his heat, his soft groan, and then the taste of his tongue in her mouth. God. God. Hardly more than a week after she’d left the house where she’d lived with the husband she still loved, she’d kissed another man.

  “By the way, your ex-grief counselor called.”

  “What?” Juliet blinked, trying to follow Marlys’s next thread of conversation.

  “That woman you used to see after Dad died. Did you tell her I needed help?” Marlys looked ready to spit fire at the idea.

  “What? No, of course not. She has the home number and was probably just checking—”

  The other woman cut her off with a slash of her hand. “Yeah, yeah. That’s what she said. Checking on you.” Marlys leaned over to toy with a tail of denim fringe on the edge of her ripped kneehole, so that her shiny dark hair hid her face. “Did you get anything out of that? The counseling?”

  Mercurial was a good way to describe Marlys’s moods, and Juliet found her hard to keep up with on her good days. But now, rattled by Noah, rattled by that kiss—oh, God—she was struggling more than usual. “The counseling? You want to know about the counseling?”

  “Yeah.” Th
e dark-haired woman jerked upright and folded her arms over her chest. “Tell me about it.”

  “I went for just a few weeks,” she answered, not sure what information the other woman actually wanted. “It let me know that my feelings were entirely normal.”

  Feelings like the ones she’d been experiencing lately, Juliet realized. During their last session, her counselor had gone over what to expect in the upcoming months.

  Deep loneliness and isolation. Check.

  Then a lessening of the heavy grief. Check.

  Finally, the renewal of sexual drive.

  At the time, that possibility had seemed remote. Due to Wayne’s cancer and treatment, the physical side of their marriage had ended long, long before his death. She’d believed her urges in that direction were dead, too.

  Okay, she thought, taking a deep breath and letting it out. So what had happened today wasn’t crazy or weird or even unexpected. Wayne would be the first one—as a matter of fact, he had been the first one. “Juliet,” he’d said. “You’re too young to have your future end with my life.”

  But there wasn’t room in her heart for anyone else. There wasn’t.

  “Well, I’m at least as normal as you,” Marlys declared.

  Not even close, Juliet wanted to retort, but she’d managed to play peacemaker for this long so she swallowed the words. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “It’s too late for that, don’t you think? With the anniversary of Dad’s death coming up, the rumors are swirling again, you know. I hear it at the club, in the shop, around all the old family friends. Deal Breaker. Happy Widow.”

  “Marlys—”

  “If only you’d been there for Dad on the day he died. But I forget where you were again? Oh, yeah, a spa.”

  Spa. How Juliet had come to hate those three letters arranged in that particular order. It had been all over the cable channels. They’d run footage of the place’s fancy double doors, zeroing in on the discreet placard that read CELL PHONES OFF BEFORE CROSSING THIS THRESHOLD.

  Without thinking, Juliet had complied with that order. So when she returned home to the terrible news, she’d been glowing from a facial and sporting a fresh pedicure.