She was avoiding eye contact with him, so he lifted her chin with his pointer finger, fixing his gaze on hers.
“The thing is, Harp, the crazy thing is, it had nothing to do with you. I know that doesn’t help you at all. But it was all about me. I totally get that what I did was about the shittiest thing I could have done to you. It wrecked your self-esteem. At the time, I was too caught up in me to realize that. I needed so badly to get away. To escape my brother’s fate.
“When Katie got pregnant, it scared the crap out of me. All of a sudden I watched my own life flickering by like on one of those movie reels they used to show at the cinema back during World War II. And it was me and you and a passel of kids and me with a lousy job and not being able to afford a wife let alone a kid, let alone a slew of them, and I don’t know why it scared me so much. More than likely because of my father, because of what a complete dick he was, up and leaving my mom the way he did, with her having to support two kids on her lousy salary and how we always struggled and did without.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, exasperated at himself for his lousy explanation. “So what was my response? I did the stupid thing: I ran from you before we got caught up with burden and responsibility and the real world in ways that I wasn’t prepared to contemplate.”
“But you didn’t even include me in that discussion, Noah. You didn’t give me a chance to have a say in things. You took my rights from me. And you took my boyfriend from me.” She shook her head as if she was erasing that comment. “No. You took my world away from me. You and I had been together forever. It was always Harper and Noah. Noah and Harper. But then it was bye-bye Noah and to a certain extent bye-bye Harper. I didn’t even know who I was. I was so lost without you. And heartbroken. And insulted. And truly disrespected. You didn’t have the common decency to include me in your decision-making.”
He leaned forward and tenderly clasped her face between his hands. “In some ways that’s important, Harper. Don’t you see? You and I didn’t have a you and an I. We were a ‘we.’ We’d become one unit. I needed to figure out me. And I think you did as well. Had I stayed here, you never would have detached from me. And it’s not that I didn’t like to be so close to you—I loved it. But I knew in my gut that we needed to be two separate people before we could ever become one in a true sense of the word. And of course I knew leaving was the ultimate risk because the chances were strong that you’d never take me back. It was a risk I believed I had no choice but to take.”
She frowned.
He pulled her close, locking eyes with hers. “I could never have been the man you needed when I was the boy I was. I needed to grow, to learn, to live before I could have understood what it meant to truly be the man you deserve, Harper. I hope you’ll take that into consideration.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Harper was struggling with all of Noah’s revelations. They made so much sense if seen through the prism of his lens. But through hers, she was never able to see that. She only knew the hurt, pain, and rejection she’d experienced. And as much as she knew Noah, there was this internal struggle she didn’t understand: all the things with his dad and his fears that he might be cut from the same cloth. She had no idea.
And the law school. Noah had talked about that for years. It was hard to fathom the change of heart.
“Betty said you left law school because your mother was sick.”
He shook his head. “Not because, but when. The truth was I’d already reached a point where I knew it was time to let it go. I thought it was my dream, but it turns out it wasn’t.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“About Mom? Or law school?”
“Both? But mostly your mom. She was a lovely woman.”
“Yeah, well I’m sorry too about my mom. But don’t lose any sleep over the law school bit. I wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer. So much arguing. So much studying. It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t meant to be the next Clarence Darrow.”
“You know something?” She twirled her fingers in Noah’s chest hair.
“What?”
“I thought you were working like a minimum wage job at the inn. I had no idea it was yours. Is it something you want to continue?”
He pulled her closer. “Honestly at first, I thought I’d only try to dig the thing out of debt. My mother was a lovely person but she mismanaged the hell out of the place. I’ve worked hard these past several months to correct inefficiencies, consolidate debt, everything to make this place work. And in the process, I sort of fell in love with it.”
“It agrees with you. I watched you working there. You can tell it makes you happy. And you’re comfortable with it.”
He smiled that half smile again. “I’m finding all sorts of familiar things have become particularly comfortable.”
He pressed his hands on her bottom and pulled her toward him. There was no mistaking what he was talking about. Comfortable would be an understatement.
“But wait a minute,” she said, holding up a finger. “One thing you haven’t confessed to yet: Who is the boy on Facebook? And what is your relationship with his mother?”
“Wait—you were spying on my Facebook page? Does that mean you were stalking me?” He grinned and she poked her finger into his arm, hard. “Ouch! What was that for?”
“Just because. It’s the least I can do to teach you a lesson.”
“Oh, I’ve got all kinds of lessons I wouldn’t mind teaching you. Or vice versa. I’m a good student. I promise.”
“You’re still not answering me. The boy with the whipped cream beard.”
Noah laughed. “You mean Tyler?”
“Tyler? Is this Matt’s boy? I think that’s the name Betty referred to.”
“And my relationship with his mother is that she’s my sister-in-law.”
Harper blushed. “When I saw that picture of you with him, I thought you had left me because you got some other woman pregnant. I thought he was your son.”
“Harps, do you seriously think I would have cheated on you?”
She pushed out her lower lip. “No, but I also never thought you would have abandoned me.”
He pulled her to him. “Fair enough.”
“You couldn’t get more out of character than that.”
He laughed quietly. “Probably knocking up some woman behind your back and leaving you for her would have trumped what I pulled.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “I’d hope you would have given me the benefit of the doubt. But I get it, Harps. You had no more benefit of the doubt left to give. Though I’m awfully surprised you hadn’t heard through the grapevine about Matt and Katie.”
“Maybe under other circumstances, I would have. But I shut out your family and everything to do with them. Everyone knew I was going to cut them off if they shared anything to do with you.”
“Ouch.”
“Did I mention how much that hurt me?”
“Maybe once or twice.”
Harper’s text dinged while they lay there. She grabbed her phone from off of the nightstand.
“Let me make sure this isn’t anything urgent,” she said. “It’s not like I get middle-of-the-night texts normally.”
She held out her phone as she pressed her thumb to open the text.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Danny,”
“The fly-eater?”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, Harper, I’ve been meaning to tell you something about him.”
“Give me a sec,” she said, holding up a finger. “Wait. This is really weird. This is really weird.”
“Is everything okay?”
She shook he head. “It says it’s from his wife.” She read aloud from the text. “Listen, bitch. This is Danny’s wife. I know about you. I’ve been reading Danny’s messages. I know about all of his women. Let me tell you: if you ever fucking go near my husband again, you’ll have me to answer to.”
Harper’
s eyes opened wide. “What the hell?”
Noah reached for her hand in the dark. “That’s what I wanted to let you know about. Only I wasn’t quite sure how to break it to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was on my way to the men’s room, and I overheard him having a phone conversation when you two were out together. I heard him talking intimately to someone on the phone and from the sounds of it, it seemed like it was a serious relationship.”
“And you didn’t let me know about it?”
He clasped her hand between his. “I wasn’t exactly sure of the best way to break it to you. I mean if I went up and told you, you’d never have believed me, would you? You’d have accused me of being jealous or trying to break you up.”
Harper was quiet while she mulled this. “You were jealous of him, though?” It was a statement, but she was asking as if it was a question.
He murmured into her neck. “Jealous doesn’t even begin to touch what I was feeling toward that fly-eating little shit. First off, I didn’t want him anywhere near you, and I had to bite my lip even though all I wanted to do was beat the crap out of him and tell him to stay away from you. When I found out he was likely two-timing you, I wanted to kill him. I knew that would be so hurtful to you and you didn’t deserve to be hurt again. I’d already hurt you enough for a lifetime. I’m sorry to have kept it from you, but until I had better proof, I could never have convinced you. Do you forgive me?”
She sighed. “What bums me out is that I was so damned gullible.”
“I’m not sure if I even want to know this, but did you have feelings for him?”
“Well, right now my feelings involve wanting to wrap my hands around his sneaky bastard throat,” she said. “I mean, he seemed so nice and charming and cute and all. Though to be honest, there was something missing there. I didn’t get any fireworks, even though I tried.”
“Fireworks?”
“When we kissed. It didn’t stir anything in me. It was kind of like kissing a brother.”
Noah grinned. “You know I was hoping against hope you didn’t carry a torch for him. When you described your kiss in my car that night as ‘nice,’ I was certain I still had a chance with you. I could tell it was your first kiss, and nobody can get too excited about a kiss that was ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant.’”
“Good detective work.” She sighed. “Yeah, try as I might, it simply didn’t blow my skirt.”
“Score one for the good guys, then. I’d like nothing more than to blow that skirt of yours.”
“That makes us even then because you’ve got something I might be happy to blow—” She blurted out a laugh.
“You get no objections from me, babe.” He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her tightly to him. “You gonna reply to that disgruntled wife of the fly-eater?”
Harper paused for a minute, pondering. “Nah. Let’s let it dangle. He deserves that.”
“So that leaves it up to me to stake my claim, then.”
“Stake away, Noah. But don’t do anything that’s going to hurt me, okay? My heart can’t take that ever again.”
“I know I’m going to have to keep working hard to regain your trust, Harper. But I want you to know I’m going to be relentless in that pursuit. So don’t for a second think I’m going to stop proving myself to you. Because I love you, Harper Landry. For that matter, I always have.”
“It’s only that for a long damned time you had a funny way of showing it.”
“Try me now—I think I can persuade you.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You think, do you?”
He nodded. “About that dry spell…”
“Ahhh,” she said. “Of course. I think you’ll need to water my garden on a fairly regular basis to prove that you’re intentions are honorable.”
“My hose is at the ready.”
And they laughed with relief as Noah rolled her over to prove his point.
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Keep reading for a sample from Falling for Mr. Maybe, the next book in the Falling for Mr. Wrong series.
Falling for Mr. Maybe
by Jenny Gardiner
Chapter One
Georgia Childress took an odd sort of pride in all the dinks and rust spots her fifteen-year-old chalk-yellow Volvo station wagon sported. Maybe they weren’t exactly badges of honor, but each one had its own little story to tell, even if they did occasionally remind her of some of her more blond moments while driving in which she perhaps could have paid a little bit more attention while behind the wheel. And at the end of the day, they were a part of who Georgie was, like it or not.
The good news is nothing really bad ever happened in any of those episodes. Even the time she sort of backed out erratically and scraped bumpers with the mayor (four-inch-long black streak on the front right bumper) ended up being okay; Mayor Petrilli liked Georgie enough to hire her to petsit her two yellow Labs when she went on vacation for two weeks. Granted she did insist that she not take the dogs in her car, but nevertheless, it was all good.
Even that time she backed into her brother’s best friend Max’s ten-speed bike (ten-inch scrape caused by the bike’s hand brakes along the center of the trunk), it worked out. Yeah, it did cost her a few hundred dollars in repairs, but he didn’t stay mad at Georgie. For long.
Georgie had just gotten back into her car after taking a late-day stroll along the beach. Whenever she got a chance to take a break and sink her toes into the warm, fine sand along the shoreline, she did so. It was her happy place, listening to the repetitive swoosh of waves upon the shore. Walking along the beach helped her put life into perspective and gave her a sense of inner peace.
Summer was on the wane, and soon the beach landscape would take on an entirely different complexion and not be so welcoming to bare feet and tank tops. Although Georgie was happy to stroll beachside even with snow falling from the sky—unfortunately becoming more and more rare here in North Carolina—she was happiest on a day like today: wisps of cotton-candy clouds lacing the late-afternoon sky as the sun cast its warm melon glow across the sand.
It’s one of the reasons she moved back to Verity Beach in the first place; something about the ocean called to her. Sometimes she swore she must have been a mermaid (better that than, say, a sea manatee, or a man-of-war jellyfish) in a past life, she loved the ocean so much. Although, yeah, that whole broken engagement in D.C. thing certainly impelled her homeward as well. Nothing like being dumped weeks before your betrothal to the man you thought loved you to send you scurrying back to a place of comfort and familiarity.
Georgie knocked the sand off of her feet and slid them back into her flipflops. She needed to get to the grocery store and pick up something to make for dinner, and it was getting late. Her tummy was rumbling and she freely admitted she was a slave to that demanding organ.
She put the key in the ignition, switched the radio to her favorite station, and threw the car in reverse, accelerating out of her space maybe a little faster than necessary. Until she heard a loud crunch and slammed on the brakes.
“Crap,” she said, throwing open her door (dinging the car door next to hers in the process) and walking to the back to see what had happened.
She crunched up her chin and pursed her lips as she took in the sight of a surfboard lopped in half, one side partially dangling by some strands of wood but hanging at a distinctly perpendicular angle to the other half of it, which seemed to have s
mushed into the back-end of the car next to her, leaving a fairly ugly dent in the vehicle.
Which was evidently owned by a sort of cute guy with a really huge scowl on his face.
“Hey lady,” he shouted, shaking his fist. “What the fuck? You murdered my board!”
Which Georgie knew was her cue to apologize profusely, even as she stared at the guy, whose wet suit was stripped down to his lean hips, exposing a beautiful, tanned chest with strong pecs, dusted with golden hair, which complemented the shoulder-length dirty blond hair on his head and the sexy needs-a-shave scruff on his handsome face.
“Oh my god, I am sooooooo sorry,” Georgie said, reaching to lift the surfboard as if she could just force the two pieces back together. She could not. “I don’t know how I missed seeing that.”
He was nodding his head as if in a catatonic state while flailing his arms in a fit of pique. “Any more than you could have missed a damned atom bomb dropping and the commensurate mushroom cloud,” he said, his eyes wide with what might have been incredulity. “I mean what about the damned board could you not have seen when you were backing out? It’s six freaking feet long. That’s like not seeing a grown man in your rearview mirror.”
Georgie knit her brow, mortified but also kind of indignant because it was as if he thought she’d done it on purpose.
“Except this was sideways, not up and down.” She sort of shifted her hands in a horizontal then vertical manner to demonstrate.
He cocked his head, as if he was trying to grasp if she’d really just said that.
“I’m not going to dignify that daft reply with a response.”
“Look, again, I’m really so very sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it. I was backing up. There was a glare in my mirror I think, the sun was reflecting off of something and it sort of blinded me for a second, and then, I don’t know, your car was back there and it was at a weird angle I guess, and shit, look what I did to that, too.” Georgie nodded at the damaged car.
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