Noah
Scarlett, my Scarlett,
Tonight, I miss you more than my words can possibly convey. I wish I could fly to you, even if just for a few hours. The only thought that keeps me going here is knowing you’ll be with me soon. On nights like tonight, I escape by picturing us in the Rockies, at home and at peace. I’ll teach William how to camp and fish. You’ll be able to write—to do whatever you want. And we’ll be happy. So happy. We’re due a little tranquility, don’t you think? Not that I regret volunteering for this war. After all, it brought me to you…
She slammed the door in my face.
She actually slammed the door in my face.
I sucked in a deep breath, noting the particular burn in my lungs that always accompanied the high altitude. Of all the outcomes I pictured during the flight, this hadn’t been one of them.
The solution had come to me while I’d been rereading Scarlett’s and Jameson’s letters. He’d been able to break down Scarlett’s walls because he’d been there, holding on to that suitcase in Middle Wallop, so I’d packed mine and gotten on a plane.
I steadied my temper, lifted my hand, and knocked again. To my surprise, she answered.
“As I was saying, hang up on me—” My words froze in my throat.
There was something very wrong here. Georgia looked…off, as though she had just been delivered the kind of news you had to sit down to hear. Not that she wasn’t as beautiful as always, but her skin was bloodless, her
face slack, and her eyes—those exquisite blue eyes—were empty. “Is everything okay?” I asked softly, my chest tightening.
She looked right through me for a second. “What do you want, Noah?” Something was definitely wrong.
“Can I come in? I promise not to talk about the book.” My chest tightened with an immediate, overwhelming urge to fix whatever had gone wrong.
Georgia’s brow knit, but she nodded and opened the door for me. “Come on, let’s get you something to drink.” Did this have to do with
Damian?
She nodded again, then led us down the hall and into an expansive kitchen. It was all I could do to keep my hand off the small of her back or offer her a hug. A hug?
I’d never been this far inside the house before, but the kitchen fit what I had already seen. It was a Tuscan theme, with tawny-colored cabinetry and darker granite countertops. The woodwork was ornate but not overdone. The appliances were professional grade. The only thing that seemed out of place were slightly discolored pieces of artwork pinned to a bulletin board on the wall.
“Why don’t you sit down,” I suggested, gesturing to the stools that lined the kitchen island.
“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” she asked, averting her gaze.
“Let’s just pretend our roles are fluid for the moment.” I moved to the stove, noting the teakettle on the back corner burner. To my relief, Georgia sat down, resting her forearms on the granite.
I dropped the keys to my rental car into my right pocket, filled the teakettle with water, and set it back on the stove, igniting the gas burner. Then I began my hunt.
I opened three cabinets before I found the one I was looking for. “Do you have a favorite?”
Georgia looked past me to the carefully organized tea supply. “Earl Grey,” she responded.
There was a squeezable honey bear next to the tea, and on instinct, I brought that to the countertop, too.
“You’re not having any?” Georgia glanced toward the singular packet of tea.
“I’m more of a hot chocolate kind of guy,” I admitted. “But you’re making tea.”
“You look like you need it.”
Two lines appear between her eyes. “But why would you…” She shook her head.
“Why would I what?” I braced my palms on the island across from where she sat.
“Never mind.”
“Why would I what?” I asked again. “Why would I take care of you?” I guessed.
Her gaze flickered my way.
“Because, contrary to popular belief, I’m not that big of an asshole, and you look like your dog just died.” I tilted my head. “And both my mother and sister would kick my ass if I didn’t.” I shrugged.
Surprise flared in her eyes. “But they’d never know.”
“I try to live most of my life like my mother will always find out what I’ve done.” Corner of my mouth tugged upward. “In reality, she usually does anyway, and the lectures last for hours. Hours. And as for the other parts…well, she never needs to know.” My brow puckered as the overwhelming silence of the house hit me. “Where is your mother? Usually she’s the one making sure you’re hydrated.”
She scoffed. “She was making sure you were hydrated. She’s well aware that I can fend for myself.” She laced her fingers in front of her, and her knuckles turned white. “Besides, she’s probably halfway to the airport by now.”
My stomach sank. Given the tone with which she’d said that, my bets were on Ava being the reason Georgia looked shell-shocked. “Was it a planned trip?”
Georgia laughed, but there was nothing happy about the sound. “Yeah, I’d say it was planned well in advance.”
Before I could question her, the teakettle whistled. I removed it from the burner, only to realize I hadn’t looked for a cup.
“Cabinet to the left, second shelf,” Georgia said. “Thanks.” I grabbed a mug, then set the tea to steep. “I should be the one thanking you.”
I arched a brow. “Fluid roles, remember?”
She offered me a smile. It was barely there, lasting only a flash of a second, but it was genuine.
“Do you take it with milk, too?” I asked as I slid the mug and honey across the island to her.
“God no.” She tilted the honey bear on its head and squeezed a dollop of the amber liquid into her tea. “Gran would tell you that’s sacrilege.”
“Would she?” I asked, hoping she would elaborate.
Georgia nodded and slid off her stool, coming around the island to open the drawer directly behind me. “She would.” She took the spoon from the drawer and returned to her seat before stirring her tea. “She actually preferred sugar, though. The honey was always just for me. It didn’t matter how long I’d been away; she always kept it for me, kept a place for me.” A wistful look crossed her face.
“You must miss her.”
“Every day. Do you miss your dad?”
“Absolutely. It’s gotten better with time, but I’d give anything to have him back.” Come to think of it, I’d only ever heard about the Stanton women. “What about your dad?”
“I don’t have one.” She said it so matter-of-factly that I blinked. “I have one, or had one, of course. I’m not the product of immaculate conception or anything,” she said as she took her spoon to the dishwasher and put it in. “I’ve just never met him. He and my mom were both in high school when I was born, and she never gave up his name.”
Another piece of the puzzle that was Georgia Stanton clicked into place.
She never knew her father. Scarlett raised her. So what did that make Ava? “Are you sure you don’t want anything to drink?” she asked. “It feels a
little weird not getting you something when you made tea for me.” She looked at me expectantly.
“Not everything is quid pro quo,” I said softly.
Her spine straightened, and she turned her back on me, heading for the refrigerator. “In my experience, it’s always quid pro quo.” She took a bottle of water from the refrigerator, then shut the door. “In fact, there are very few people who don’t want something from me.” She set the bottle of water down on the counter in front of me and returned to her seat. “So please, drink up. After all, you didn’t fly all the way to Colorado because your Spidey senses told you I needed a cup of tea.”
You want something, too.
Her eyes said it even if her mouth didn’t, and damn it, she was right. My stomach fell into what felt like a bottomless pit.
I nodded once, and then we both drank.
“Why are you here? Not that I’m not thankful for the tea, or the distraction, because I am. I just wasn’t expecting you.” She leaned forward, warming her hands on the mug.
“I promised I wouldn’t talk about the book.” Book or not, I was glad to be here, glad to see her in a way that had zero to do with anything professional. The woman had been on my mind in one way or another for the past month.
“You always keep your promises?” Her eyes narrowed in speculation.
“I do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t make the promise.” It had been an expensive lesson.
“Even to the women in your life?” She tilted her head. “I’ve seen quite a few pictures.”
“Checking up on me?” Please say yes. God knew my browser history was full of Georgia Stanton.
“My best friend keeps sending me pictures and articles. She thinks I should jump you.” She shrugged.
She what? I squeezed my water bottle so hard, I crushed it. “Really?” My voice dropped, pushing every single image that sentence brought to mind far out of my head, or at least trying to.
“Funny, right? Especially given the parade of women you keep your
promises to.” She gave me a sugar-sweet smile and batted her lashes.
I laughed, then shook my head. “Georgia, the only promises I make to women are what time I’ll pick them up and what they can expect while they’re with me. Days. Nights. Weeks. I find it saves a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of drama if everyone knows what they’re getting up front, and despite your thoughts on my writing, I’ve never had an unsatisfied complaint.” I twisted the top back onto my empty water bottle, keeping my thoughts far away from the things I wanted to promise her.
“So romantic.” She rolled her eyes, but color flushed her cheeks.
“I never claimed to be, remember?” I smirked, leaning back against the counter.
“Ah yes, the bookstore. Noted. So you’ve never broken a promise?” Her voice pitched in disbelief.
My face fell.
“Not since I was sixteen and I forgot to take my little sister, Adrienne, for ice cream after I said I would.” I winced, remembering the sound of the beeping hospital monitors. “My mom took her and got into the accident I told you about.”
Georgia’s eyes widened.
“Adrienne—my sister—was fine, but Mom…well, there were a lot of surgeries. After that, I made it a point to never commit myself unless I was sure I could follow through.” I’d also drafted my very first book the following summer.
“You’ve never missed a deadline?”
“Nope.” Though that might change if she didn’t start communicating with me about this particular book.
Curiosity sparkled in those crystal blue eyes. I could have written an entire novel dedicated to them. In a way, I guess I already was, given that
she and Scarlett had the same ones.
“Never blown a New Year’s resolution?”
I grinned. “I never make them,” I admitted like it was a dirty little secret.
She tugged her bottom lip between her teeth.
Shit. I wanted to suck it free. The bottle crinkled in my hand. “Never stood a woman up for a date?”
“I always say that I’ll do my best to make it, and I do. I never promise a woman I’ll meet her unless I’m already there.” Anyone who went out with me knew that if I was sucked into a story, chances were, they were getting a cancellation text. Granted, I’d send it hours in advance, but the story came first. Always. “I’m not exactly the guy you depend on during a deadline. Unless you’re my publisher.”
“So you’re more about the semantics,” she argued, sipping her tea.
I barely managed to keep from sputtering. “No, I’m more about defining expectations and either meeting or exceeding them.” We locked eyes, and that tangible hit of electricity struck me again.
“Uh-huh.” She clicked her tongue. “Do you still have dinner with your mother?”
“Once a week. Unless I’m on book tour, a research trip, vacation, that kind of thing.” I gave it some thought. “Sometimes she makes me cut it to every other week.” My lips tugged at the corners.
“She makes you cut it?”
“She does.” I nodded. “She would prefer I spend less time at her house and more time finding a wife.”
Georgia startled, nearly spit out her tea. “A wife.” She set the mug on the counter. “And how is that going?”
“I’ll let you know,” I managed with a straight face.
“Please do. I’d hate not to be in the know when it comes to your love life.”
I laughed and shook my head again. She was something else.
“Gran would have liked you,” she mused quietly. “She wasn’t a fan of
your books, that’s true. But you, she would have liked. You have just the right mix of arrogance and talent that she would have appreciated. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that you’re pretty. She liked pretty men.” Georgia rubbed at the back of her neck. It was long and graceful, just like the rest of her.
“You think I’m pretty.” I grinned, raising my eyebrows. She rolled her eyes. “Out of all that, you dwell on pretty.”
“Well, if you’d said sexy, handsome, well-endowed, or body-like-a-god, I would have dwelled on those, but you didn’t, so I’m just making do with what content I have.” I tossed my water bottle in the recycling bin at the end of the island.
Her cheeks turned a deeper shade of pink.
Mission accomplished. She’d been so pale there for a while that I was starting to wonder if I’d get to see that fire again.
“I can hardly testify to those last two.” She took her mug to the dishwasher.
“Guess your friend didn’t show you every article,” I teased. I liked that she was neat. Not that I had any business liking anything about her, to include the way her shorts clung to her very nice ass, but there I was, doing it anyway. How had that ass escaped my attention last time I was here? Or those mile-long legs? You had other, more important things on your mind. “So the first two are in?” My eyes trailed down the nape of her neck as she returned to her seat.
“Depends on how much you’re pissing me off at the moment.” She lifted a shoulder.
“And right now?”
Her gaze swept over me from head to toe and back up again, taking in my cargo shorts and NYU shirt. I would have worn the Armani had I known there’d be a test.
“I’d say you’re a solid seven.” Again, she pulled it off straight-faced.
Nice. I lifted a single brow. “And when I’m pissing you off?” “You slide right off the scale into the negatives.”
I laughed. Damn, how long had it been since a woman had made me
laugh so many times in just a few minutes?
She folded her hands on the island, and her energy shifted. “Tell me why you’re really here, Noah.”
“I promised—”
“So, what? You’re just going to stand in my kitchen and make me tea?” Her chin lifted. “I know you’re here about the book.”
I studied her carefully, taking in the rise of color in her cheeks and the spark in her eyes. She was mostly back to what I’d consider normal, but in all honesty, I didn’t have a baseline when it came to Georgia Stanton. I was flying blind.
“You want to get out of here?” I asked.
“What do you have in mind?” She looked more than skeptical. “How’s your life insurance?”
…
“No,” she said a half hour later as she stared up at the rock face that stretched a hundred feet above us.
“It’s fun,” I argued, gesturing to a couple of guys who were all grins as they packed up their equipment. “See, they think it’s fun.”
“You have lost your mind if you think I’m climbing that.” She lifted her sunglasses to the top of her head so I could see just how serious she was.
“I didn’t say you had to climb the whole thing,” I argued. “There’s a less challenging path right over there.” That one was only thirty-or-so feet, and my niece could easily do it, not that I was about to say that to Georgia.
“Are you trying to kill me?” she whispered as the other climbers walked past on the trail.
“We have equipment.” I gave the shoulder strap of my backpack a pat. “I brought an extra harness.” I eyed her footwear. “Your shoes aren’t exactly what I’d recommend, but they’ll do until we can get you some good ones.”
Her eyes narrowed. “When you said, throw on some active wear and
let’s go for a hike, I assumed, shockingly, that we were hiking.” She gestured to her Lululemon-covered body.
“We did hike,” I argued. “It was half a mile to get up here from the trailhead.”
“Semantics, again!” she snapped, putting her hands on her very nice hips.
Stop looking at her fucking hips.
“What are you afraid of?” I turned my Mets cap backward and shoved my glasses to the top of my head.
“Falling off the mountain!” She pointed to the rock face. “It’s a pretty realistic fear when you think about climbing it.”
“Think of it as vertical hiking.” I shrugged. “Unreal.” She jabbed her finger in my direction.
“I was only kidding about the life insurance comment. I won’t let you fall.” Ever. She’d already been let down too many times.
She scoffed. “Okay. Right. And how exactly are you going to prevent it?” She lifted her eyebrows.
“I’ll be your belay partner and control the rope in case you fall. See, we put the harness on—”
“Why the hell do you even have an extra harness? Do you just fly around the United States, hoping to pick up women climbers?” She folded her arms across her chest.
“No.” Though I couldn’t help but wonder if that thought was spurring her on or not. Sure, it made me an ass, but the thought of Georgia getting all worked up out of jealousy was pretty fucking hot. “It’s my extra harness in case mine breaks. I like to climb, therefore, I bring my equipment when I’m going somewhere with mountains…you know, like Colorado.”
“How did you even know about this place, anyway?” she asked, still downright hostile.
“I found it the last time I was here.” She tilted her head.
“During the days I was waiting for you to decide if I was good enough
to—”
“You promised!” And the finger was back again.
I pressed my lips in a tight line and breathed in through my nose for a count of three. “Georgia, I’m not going to force you up that rock face—”
“As if you could.”
“—but I am promising that if you choose to climb, I will not let you fall off the mountain.” I lowered my face to hers, making sure she knew I was serious.
My best friend thinks I should jump you. My brain was pretty much a broken record after hearing that.
“Because you control gravity?” She blinked.
I had never met a more frustrating woman in my life. “Because I’m going to—”
She lifted that brow again.
I sighed. “If you wanted to climb, I would go first and hook the rope up.
I scouted it the first time I was here.”
Her brows lowered. “And what would keep you from falling off?”
I swung the backpack from my shoulders and shook it lightly. “I’d clip in. We’re not talking about Yosemite here. It’s pretty well-traveled. Then as you climbed, I’d have you on belay, so if you did slip off, you’d just hang there dangling until you found your footing.”
Her jaw dropped. “You what?”
I lifted the backpack slightly. “You would be attached to one end of the rope, and I would have the other.”
She drew back.
“You’d be safe,” I promised.
She shook her head, her mouth tightening.
A thought dawned on me. “Georgia, if you don’t want to climb because you’re scared of heights, or you don’t want to scrape up your hands, or you just flat don’t want to, that’s fine.”
“I know that.” Her eyes said she hadn’t known that. What? Like I was going to shove her up the mountain while she begged me not to?
“Right.” My chest ached. “But if you don’t want to climb because you think I’ll drop you, then that’s a whole other matter. I promise you that I will not drop you.” I kept my voice even and low, hoping she’d hear the truth in my words. “I’m really good at this.”
She swallowed, then glanced at the bag. “I barely know you.”
“See? More articles your best friend missed out on. You can run a google search on my climbing history if we’ve got service up here. It’s pretty well documented that I’m an avid climber, and I don’t just mean the easy stuff.”
Her forehead puckered. “I never said you weren’t.”
My stomach lurched. “So it’s not my skill level you’re worried about,” I said slowly.
She averted her gaze and shifted her weight. “You could be a serial killer,” she suggested, sarcasm dripping from her tone as she lifted her hands.
Deflecting. She uses humor to deflect.
“I’m not.”
“You kill off a lot of people in your books. Just saying.” She looked up the rock face, tilting her head back.
“Not through homicide, and now who’s talking about books?” A smile tugged at her lips.
“Besides, there are three other climbers right there.” I pointed to a group midway up the face. “Pretty sure they’d rat me out if I murdered you in broad daylight.”
She stared at the other climbers silently.
“You’re not going to climb, are you?” I asked quietly.
She shook her head, her lips pursing as she watched the other climbers.
Her refusal stung. It shouldn’t have, and I knew it, but it still did. “Want to hike up the rest of the trail?”
Her head snapped my way in surprise. “You can climb. I’m happy to watch.”
“I didn’t come up here for me.” I’d brought her in hopes that the fresh
air would help clear out whatever had taken her down earlier.
She winced. “I’d still hate to make you miss out. Go ahead. I’m fine.” She nodded, plastering on a smile so fake, it was almost comical.
“I’d rather hike with you. Come on.” I nodded back toward the trail and slipped my pack over my shoulders.
“You’re sure?” She narrowed her eyes. “Absolutely.”
“It’s not you.” She sucked in a breath, then glanced back up at the rock wall. “The last man who promised to keep me safe screwed his lead and dropped me on my ass,” she said softly. “But I’m sure you already know that. Everyone knows that.”
If I’d been the serial killer she’d joked about, Damian Ellsworth would have been my first victim.
“And after today…” She shook her head, the edges of her mouth trembling. “Today just isn’t a good day for the whole trust fall thing. So let’s get going.” She forced another smile, then took off up the trail.
She doesn’t trust you. I swore under my breath as I realized that was the same reason she wouldn’t let me finish the book how I wanted.
It all came down to trust.
I steadied myself before striding after her, cursing at the irony. I’d spent the majority of my life making sure I lived by my word, and now it was being questioned by a woman so jaded even I couldn’t dig out of the hole someone else had dug.
Guess it was good that I was an expert climber.
“So how long are you here for?” she asked as we continued the hike. “Until I finish the book.” My lungs burned as we pushed up the trail.
“And, since my deadline is in two and a half months, I’d guess I’ll be here about that long.”
“What? Really?” “Really.”
Two little lines appeared between her brows. “So where are you staying?”
“I rented a little place down the road,” I replied, a smug smile quirking at my lips.
“Oh?”
“Yep. It’s called Grantham Cottage.”
She stopped in the middle of the trail, so I turned around and kept walking backward, savoring the surprise and horror on her face. “Like I said, hang up on me now, neighbor.”
The look on her face made the hassle of tracking down a rental entirely worth it.
