by Lisa Jackson
She’d had it hard, her parents unable to care for her because of their addictions. But there had been some innocence left in her, and that had been apparent. Noah’s had been long gone. In every sense of the word. And he had known that touching her, taking advantage of her in any way, would be an unforgivable sin.
All of those thoughts had only mattered for a few moments, anyway. Because it wasn’t long after that—just a few minutes, really—that Meg had met Charlie. And it had been immediately clear that Charlie had her affection from moment one.
It wasn’t really a mystery to Noah as to why. Charlie was blond, had that kind of All-American football player handsomeness that people prized so much. And along with that, he had an easy smile, a kind of relaxed demeanor. Something Noah had certainly never possessed. But then in Noah’s experience if you relaxed that was when someone could get a shot in. Physically or emotionally, and by the time Noah had been sent to that last foster home he had been well past the point of letting anyone land a blow.
They had become friends, all three of them. Quickly, easily.
Meg had always loved Charlie, while Charlie mostly loved himself. And Noah burned.
When a few moments ticked by and Meg did not reappear, he realized that her stubborn ass was actually going to try to drive back down the mountain in this weather. He put a coat on, grabbed his cowboy hat off the peg by the door, and walked outside into the bitter cold. He had worked outside all day, balls deep in a snowbank, so heading back outside now was low on his list. But letting anything happen to Meg was unthinkable.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked toward the dirt road that led back down to the main highway, following the fresh tracks left by Meg’s car.
He only had to walk around one bend before he found her, stuck.
He rolled his eyes, making his way over to the vehicle. Then he knocked on the window. She jumped, brushed a cinnamon curl away from her face, and treated him to a dark glare.
“I’m sorry, Meg, were you going to stay here all night?”
Her sherry-colored eyes flashed with annoyance. “No,” she said, her voice muffled by the window.
“Dealing with wounded pride, were you?”
She growled and pushed the car door open, nearly pushing it into Noah’s gut. “I feel like my pride has taken quite enough hits for one day.” Her shoulders sagged. “Can I stay here tonight, Noah?”
Snowflakes were falling, landing in her curls, sprinkling across her nose, joining the freckles that were there already. His stomach tightened and he told his body to calm the hell down. Meg had to stay here tonight, because she couldn’t get back down the mountain. She was his friend, and they had spent the night under the same roof countless times when they were kids.
But also, Charlie had finally wounded her to the point where she was ready to at least show Noah that she was upset with him. Usually she protected Charlie at all costs. Even when his behavior was beyond forgiveness.
It made Noah feel like finally, for the first time, the door was wedged open.
A door for what? You’re going to offer Meg marriage? As if you’d ever lie about it like Charlie does?
Hell no. Noah’s life had been too . . .
All he knew was violence. All he knew was pain. Neglect. Growing up in a drug house made you a cynic very early on. Taking care of your mother when she was passed out from yet another overdose, putting a wadded-up sweatshirt underneath her head so that she could lie more comfortably on the bathroom floor when you were only six years old, took all of the light and hope out of life pretty damn quickly.
He didn’t harbor dreams about setting up his life. About having a family. He was content with his ranch. Content with his friends.
He looked back at Meg. At her fresh-faced beauty. At that beautiful body he had always wanted to touch. All right, maybe he wasn’t completely satisfied. But there was nothing that a man in his position could offer a woman like her. Meg wanted that family she had never had. She and Charlie always had to some degree.
It was why Meg was so sweet and loyal to those around her. Why Charlie collected people.
Noah had held on to his two closest friends, and them alone.
Charlie wanted more. Meg wanted more.
Noah just wanted to survive.
“Of course you can stay here, Meg. But you should have listened to me, because now your car is stuck.”
“You’re my eternal big brother,” she groused, opening up the car door again, reaching inside, and taking out a duffel bag. “At least I have supplies.”
He let the big-brother shot hit him square on. That was how she saw him. Like a brother.
Dammit to hell.
“Thank heaven for small miracles, huh?” He reached out, taking the bag from her hands and hefting it over his shoulder.
Meg didn’t say anything. She simply trailed behind him, following him back to the house.
“I feel so stupid,” she said softly as they walked inside, and he closed the door behind them.
“Don’t feel stupid, Meg. Charlie deals in charming people. And I think he has good intentions. I think he does care about you. But he’s . . .”
“Broken,” she said, her tone fractured. “Like the rest of us.”
Pain shafted through Noah. Not at the reminder that he was broken—he knew that. But over the fact that Meg seemed to think that she was. Not in his mind. She could never be broken to him.
“I don’t know, but I’m kind of tired of defending him,” Noah said. “It’s a reflex. I’ve been doing it half my life. But Charlie is his own damn man, and he can make his own decisions. So he ought to make better ones. He certainly shouldn’t have kept stringing you along for the past decade if he never meant to do anything.”
Meg sighed sadly, then sank onto the couch, folding her hands into her lap. Her chin-length curls fell forward as she lowered her head. “This is going to sound really stupid, Noah. Can you handle more of my stupid?”
“Sure,” he said. “But for the record, I’ve never thought you were stupid.”
“Never?” She lifted her head, narrowing her eyes.
“A lost cause where he’s concerned, maybe,” he said. “But never stupid.”
She laughed. “Okay, I guess that’s a small compensation.”
“Tell me,” he said, sitting on the couch next to her. He fought the urge to reach out and take her hand in his. Because there was no reason for him to touch her. No reason at all. “Tell me what happened.”
“He made it sound like it was time for the two of us to make things more official. You know . . .” She cleared her throat. “You know Charlie has always told me that he loves me, right?”
Noah felt like he’d been punched in the chest. At the thought that Charlie shared such words easily with Meg when Noah himself hadn’t spoken those words out loud since he was a little boy, trying to wake up his passed-out mother, tears rolling down his cheeks. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to say them again. Not even to Meg.
But apparently, Charlie was able to let it all go freely. It didn’t seem fair.
“No,” Noah said.
“Well, he has. And I . . . I fell in love with him the minute I saw him. I was so lonely, and then I went to live with Jim and Nancy, and you were both there. And he . . . It was just . . .”
“It was always him,” Noah finished for her. He knew that, because the same had been true for him. Except, in his case, always Meg.
And they were one doomed, messed-up triangle.
“He made me think it was real. He made me think it was possible. And I wanted to go to New York for Christmas to surprise him. Because I wanted to finally be with him.”
“Right, of course you did. You wanted to be with the man you loved for Christmas.”
“No,” Meg said, shaking her head. “I wanted to finally be with him. Like . . . I was going to New York to sleep with him.”
Noah did his best to process that statement, and all of the implications buried in i
t. “Okay.”
“Because I never have,” she added.
All of the air rushed out of Noah’s lungs. That was something that had never occurred to him. Not even for a moment. He had done his damnedest over the years to never think about Meg and Charlie together like that. But of course, he had assumed that the two of them had slept together. He’d assumed that every time Charlie came around they did. And he always did his best to look the other way. Apparently, he had been looking so far the other way he had missed the fact that it had never happened at all.
He had tried to connect the dots, all of the blank spots, and he had come up with the absolute wrong idea about what was going on between the two of them.
“Never?” Noah asked.
Meg shook her head. “I felt like it was my only power in the situation. And I know that what Charlie and I have isn’t healthy. It’s not . . .” She balled her hands into fists and shoved them up against her eyes. “It’s not even real. And I wanted it to be so badly. I needed it to be. He was my only comfort after my parents lost me to the state. Feeling the way that I did about him, hoping the way that I did . . . It was what kept me going somehow, and even though I’ve had other things in my life as an adult, it was always there. This one constant.”
“You’ve never had sex with Charlie,” Noah said, processing the words even as he spoke them.
“That’s what I said,” she responded.
And that made him wonder. It made him wonder things he shouldn’t. It made him feel things he shouldn’t. Meg had come to live with Jim and Nancy when she was fifteen. And unless there had been other men while she was holding a torch for Charlie . . .
“I’m just sad and pathetic,” she moaned. “And I was not supposed to be a virgin still this Christmas. That was supposed to be my gift to myself.” Her cheeks turned bright red. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
No, she sure as hell shouldn’t. Because that put things in Noah’s mind that he had absolutely no business thinking. He had done his damnedest not to think of Meg as anything more than a friend for so long, and he had done a pretty piss-poor job of it—that was true enough.
And now he was being confronted with the fact that no one had had Meg in the way that he wanted to have her. Not Charlie. Not anyone.
All of those fantasies that he had about Meg had not been fulfilled by another man. And he had been convinced that they had been; of course he had. He had thought that long ago Charlie had been given everything that he wanted. Examining a different truth, coming to grips with the fact that he hadn’t . . .
Noah wanted her. He wanted her in a thousand different ways, in every different position. He wanted her whether she had been with one hundred men or none. None of it mattered to him. Because she was Meg, and nothing could ever change that.
But knowing that she was untouched did something to him. Knowing that no other man had had her the way that he fantasized about having her. About the way he had always wanted . . . It was a helluva thing.
And he was a man; he wasn’t a stone.
“I—”
She held up a hand. “I know. You don’t know what to say to that. Because I am ridiculous and you’re trying to say anything but that. Because you’re a good man and you don’t want me to feel stupid. But I do.”
“Charlie is one hell of a dumb jerk,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I just . . . I assumed . . .”
“You thought we were sleeping together.”
“Of course I did. The way you feel about him is an open secret.”
She looked shocked by that, and then sad. “Can I ask you something? Has . . . has the way he feels about me also been an open secret?”
Noah didn’t know how to answer that. Because there were too many different ways he could take that question. It would be easy to deliberately misunderstand, or to give an ambiguous answer.
“I’ll say this,” he said finally. “If Charlie loved you the way you deserve to be loved, then he would have made it official a long time ago. He would never have left you untouched. And he would certainly never have touched another woman. I don’t know what else to say but that.”
“I guess . . . I guess maybe it’s me.” Her small shoulders folded inward, her face tragically sad. “You know . . . No one else has ever really wanted me, so I suppose that it has something to do with me.”
Fire burned inside of him. A dull roar sounding in his ears. “It’s not you,” he said. “A man would have to be blind or a fool not to want you, Meg O’Neill.”
CHAPTER 3
Meg looked at Noah, at his eyes, blazing with intensity, and she felt her entire being tighten up. She didn’t know how she had ended up in this conversation with him. She didn’t know why she had admitted to him that she was still a virgin. It was just that she was all out of sorts and distressed, and the way he was looking at her right now was making her feel something else entirely. But even more intense than that was the shock of the words he had just spoken.
Suddenly, she felt like her heart was going to escape through the front of her chest, just beat its way through her body, and flop out on the floor. The way he was looking at her . . . No man had ever looked at her that way.
It was strange. Like seeing him for the first time. Like looking at a stranger.
It was as if all those strange, unsettled feelings she’d had for him over the past few months had suddenly been distilled. Intensified as she looked at him.
His dark gaze was tortured, his lips pressed into a grim line. And she really noticed those lips. The fact that they looked firm, and certain, and she wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
She was a virgin, but she had most certainly kissed Charlie. She wasn’t a stranger to a few of the bases in the game, either, so to speak. But Charlie was smooth, clean-shaven, with a much softer mouth.
For the first time, she wondered what it might feel like to kiss a man who had facial hair. To press her fingertips against the rough skin on his face.
For the first time, she wondered what it might be like to touch a man who wasn’t Charlie. A man who was so different. Dark where Charlie was fair.
And the man she was wondering about was her best friend.
She had a problem. She had several problems, but right now this was the most pressing, the most distressing. “I . . . I need a drink,” she said, standing up, shaking her hands out.
“You need a drink?” he echoed.
“Just tea. Tea would be good.”
“I don’t exactly have a robust stash of tea,” Noah responded, clearly a little bit shell-shocked by the abrupt conversation change.
“I don’t need a robust selection. I just need a warm beverage. I could pretty happily drown my feelings in alcohol, but I feel like that would be setting a bad precedent. Probably I should just try to ease my frozen heart with something comforting.”
“Whiskey could do that,” he said.
“No doubt. But just the tea.”
Noah stood up, pushing up the sleeves on those muscular forearms she had a hard time taking her eyes off. Then he made his way into the kitchen, grabbed a teakettle out of one of the cupboards, and filled it with water before setting it on the burner.
She was filled, yet again, with an intense, full feeling. Satisfaction. And that at least was welcome.
It cheered her, watching her friend move around his kitchen, operate in this life that he had created for himself. He had come such a long way from when they were children. And that forced her to think about the other ways he had changed since they were children. He had always been attractive, and she had always felt a strange sense of pride about that. That this man she cared for so much, who was her friend, was so good-looking. The way women tripped over themselves when they talked to him, and the fact that he was invariably with her and not them, often made her feel smug, even though what they shared was friendship and nothing more.
But she was looking at him now. Really looking at him. He was . . . He was
handsome. He had that kind of classic masculinity about him. Strength. A hardness that stood in bright contrast to Charlie’s learned sophistication.
She had always been so impressed with the way that Charlie had fashioned a new identity for himself. The way he had built such a sophisticated persona. One that allowed him to move in circles with people who had grown up with more money than any of them could ever dream of. It impressed her. The way he had stepped outside of himself, stepped outside of their experiences.
But there were other things that she had overlooked. Other changes that had happened in Charlie that she had purposely left unexamined so that she didn’t have to grapple with the negative connotations.
The way he faked a smile to put people in the room at ease, even when it was dishonest, even when something untoward was happening. The way he flirted with women, as though it were easy, as though sexual connections were cheap.
And then there was Noah. Noah, who didn’t treat anything like it was easy. Whose face seemed carved in stone, and for whom smiles were treated like gold dust. Noah, who had carved a life for himself here. Who had grown into himself rather than changing who he was.
He was Noah. Still Noah. Wearing battered jeans and an old shirt. That same handsome face he’d always had, with a few more lines around his eyes, and a heavier beard.
It had been so easy to be caught up in the glory of Charlie’s transformation. From a poor foster kid to a successful businessman. But there was a quiet triumph in the way that Noah had transitioned from an angry teenager to this man who now ran his own ranch. This man who didn’t seem to get outside adulation from anybody. Who seemed to find his own satisfaction within himself.
And somehow conveyed that while he was doing something as mundane as making tea.
Or maybe Meg had officially lost her mind.
That possibility could not be overlooked.
She blinked, shaking her head and pacing around the living room.
“Are you going to see Jim and Nancy for Christmas this year?” she asked.
