Noah
Scarlett,
Here we are again, separated by miles that feel too long at night, waiting for our chance to be together again. You’ve given up so much for me, and here I am, asking for more, asking you to follow me once again. I promise you, once this war is over, I’ll never let you regret choosing me. Not for one minute. I’ll fill your days with joy and your nights with love. There is so much that waits for us if we can just hold on…
“I brought lunch,” I called out to Georgia as I walked in the front door of her house. Had to admit, it was still a little weird to walk into Scarlett Stanton’s house without knocking, but Georgia had insisted, since we’d started spending our afternoons together last week in what she called Stanton University.
“Thank God, because I’m famished,” she called out from the office.
I walked through the open side of the French doors and stopped short. Georgia sat on the floor in front of her great-grandmother’s desk, surrounded by photo albums and boxes. She’d even moved the large wingback chairs out of the way to make room.
“Wow.”
She looked up at me and offered an enthusiastic smile. Damn. Just like that, my mind wasn’t on her great-grandmother or the book I’d staked my career on. It was on Georgia, plain and simple.
Something had changed between us the day we’d gone rock-climbing. Not only did it feel like we were actually on the same team, but there was now a heightened awareness, as if someone had started a countdown. I couldn’t have written the sexual tension any better. Every simple touch
between us since then was measured, careful, as if we were matches in the middle of a fireworks cache, knowing too much friction would set the whole place ablaze.
“Want to picnic?” she asked, gesturing to a vaguely open bit of floor at her side.
“I’m game if you are.” I picked my way across the spread of memories to claim the spot at her side.
“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish cringe, her wide-neck sweatshirt slipping off her shoulder to reveal a lilac bra strap. “I was looking for that one picture I told you about from Middle Wallop and got kind of lost in this.”
“Don’t apologize.” Not only did she look better than our lunches, she’d unlocked a veritable treasure trove of family history and laid it bare for me.
If that didn’t say opening up, I wasn’t sure what else could. We’d come a long way from her hanging up on me. Everything about the woman next to me was soft, from the sweep of her hair into that knot on her head, to her bare, shorts-clad, mile-long legs crossed beneath her. There was nothing icy about her.
“Once I found the pictures, I couldn’t help myself.” She smiled down at the open photo album on her lap as I took the boxes of takeout from the bag.
“No tomato,” I said, handing hers over. I couldn’t remember if my last girlfriend liked her coffee sweet or black, yet here I was, committing everything about Georgia Stanton to memory without even trying. I had it bad.
“Thank you,” she replied with a smile, taking the box before pointing up to the desk behind us. “Iced tea, unsweetened.”
“Thanks.” Guess I wasn’t the only one committing the details to memory.
“I still think you’re a weirdo for drinking it without sugar, but whatever floats your boat.” She shrugged and flipped a page in the album.
“That you?” I brushed off her commentary and leaned over her shoulder
slightly. Whether it was her shampoo or perfume, the light citrus scent I breathed in went straight to my head, along with other body parts I needed under firm control around Georgia.
“How can you tell?” She shot me a quizzical look. “You can’t even see my face.”
“I recognize Scarlett, and I highly doubt there was any other little girl dressed up as a princess Darth Vader.” Scarlett’s smile was proud, just like it was in every picture I saw of her and Georgia together.
“Fair point,” Georgia admitted. “Guess I was feeling a little dark side that year.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.” Her brow furrowed. “Mom had come to visit before marrying husband number two, if I remember correctly.”
“How many husbands has she had?” It wasn’t that I was judging, as much as the look on Georgia’s face had me more than curious.
“Five marriages, four husbands.” She flipped the page. “She married number three twice, but I think they’re getting divorced, since she’s currently back with number four. I honestly don’t bother keeping track anymore.”
It took a second to connect those dots.
“Anyway, you need the pictures from the forties, and these are mostly just me—” She moved to shut the album.
“I’d love to see them.” Anything to help me understand her better. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“I mean, Scarlett’s in them, too, right?” Weak.
“True. Okay. We can move to the older stuff next. Don’t let it get cold.” She motioned to the burger I had in front of me.
We ate and flipped through the album. Page after page was filled with pictures of Georgia’s childhood, and though some of the pictures included Hazel or Scarlett, it was years—and my entire lunch—before Ava appeared again. Georgia looked like a happy child for the most part—huge smiles in the garden, the meadow, out by the creek. Book signings in Paris and Rome
—
“No London?” I asked, turning the page back to make sure I hadn’t
missed one. Nope, just Scarlett and Georgia—who was missing two front teeth—at the Colosseum.
“She never stepped foot in England again,” Georgia said softly. “This was the last book tour, too. She wrote for another ten years, though. Swore it kept her from going senile. What about you?”
“Me? Am I at risk for going senile?” My eyebrows shot up. “How old do you think I am?”
She laughed. “I know you’re thirty-one. I meant, do you think you’ll write until you’re ninety?” she rephrased, elbowing me gently.
“Oh.” I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to imagine a time I wouldn’t write. “I’ll probably write until I’m dead. Whether I choose to publish it or not is a different subject.” Writing a book and going through the publishing process were two completely different beasts.
“I get that.” As someone raised in the industry, she undoubtedly did.
Another page, another picture, another year. Georgia’s smile was blindingly bright as she stood in front of a birthday cake—twelve, going by the decorations—with Ava at her side.
In the next picture, which looked to be a few weeks later, the light was gone from Georgia’s eyes.
“You’re not going to ask why my mother didn’t raise me?” She peered at me sideways.
“You don’t owe me an explanation.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?” she asked softly.
“I do.” I knew enough of the bare bones to piece it together. Ava had become a mother in high school, but she wasn’t cut out for being a mom. “Contrary to what experience you have with me because of our project here, I’m not in the habit of prying information out of women who don’t want to give it.” I studied the lines of her face as she looked anywhere but at me.
“Even if it helped you understand Gran?” She flipped the album page carelessly, as if the answer was inconsequential, but I knew better.
“I promise I’ll never take anything you don’t wholeheartedly want to give me, Georgia.” My voice dropped.
She turned my way and our eyes met, our faces only a breath apart. Had she been any other woman, I would have kissed her. I would’ve acted on the blatant attraction that had grown way past any analogy I could’ve mustered. This was no longer a simple zing of electricity, and it had developed far beyond a shot of lust or a surge of overwhelming desire. The inches between us were thick with need, pure and primal. It was no longer a matter of if, but when. I saw the battle raging in her eyes that felt all-too- familiar, because I waged the same war against inevitability.
Her gaze traveled to my mouth. “And what if I wholeheartedly want to give it to you?” she whispered.
“Do you?” Every muscle in my body tightened, locking down the nearly uncontrollable impulse to discover how she tasted.
Her cheeks flushed, and her breath hitched as she looked away, back to the photo album. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” She flipped through a chunk of the album, landing on her wedding pictures, not formal, but candid.
“You look beautiful.” It was more than that. Wedding-Day Georgia wore a look so openly, honestly in love that a stab of irrational jealousy flooded me. That asshole hadn’t been worthy of her heart, her trust.
“Thanks.” She flipped to what was obviously the reception. “Funny, but now when I think about that day, I mostly remember Damian schmoozing anyone he could in Gran’s circle.” She said it easily, as if it was the punch line to a joke.
My brow knitted. How long had it taken Ellsworth to dull her sparkle? “What?” she asked, glancing my way.
“You don’t look anything like the Ice Queen in these pictures,” I said softly. “I don’t understand how anyone could ever mistake you for cold.”
“Ah, back when I was all hopeful and naive.” Her head tilted as she turned the page yet again, this time revealing a shower of bubbles as the bride and groom made their way toward their honeymoon getaway car.
“The nickname didn’t come until later, but that first time I found out he was cheating on me, something…” She sighed and flipped again. “Something changed.”
“Paige Parker?” I guessed. She scoffed. “God, no.”
My attention snapped to her face as she turned a chunk of pages—years. “He wasn’t that careless back then. Actresses get you caught, but
eighteen-year-old assistants don’t.” She shrugged.
“How many—” The question was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. It was none of my business how incredibly hurtful Ellsworth was. If I were married to Georgia, I’d be far too busy keeping her happy in my bed to even think about someone else’s.
“Too many,” she responded quietly. “But I wasn’t about to tell Gran that I didn’t get that same epic love she did—not when all she wanted was to see me happy, and she’d just had that first heart attack. And I guess, admitting that I’d made the same mistake as my mom was…hard.”
“So you stayed.” My voice lowered as another piece of the Georgia puzzle clicked into place. Indomitable will.
“I adapted. It’s not like I wasn’t used to being left.” She grazed her thumb over a picture, and I looked down to see a colorful autumn tree in a location I recognized well—Central Park. Georgia stood between Damian and Ava, her arms around both, her smile a dim shadow of the one just a few years before. “There’s a warning, a sound your heart makes the first time it realizes it’s no longer safe with the person you trusted.”
My jaw flexed.
She turned another page, another black-tie affair. “It’s not as clean or impersonal as a break or a shatter. Besides, those are easy to repair if you can find all the pieces. Truly crushing a soul—now that requires a certain level of…personal violence. Your ears fill with this desperate”—flip— “rasping”—flip—“gasp. Like you’re fighting for air, suffocating in plain sight. Strangled by life and someone else’s shitty, selfish decisions.”
“Georgia,” I whispered as my stomach turned, my chest pulling tight at
the agony and anger in her words, pausing over a picture from the red- carpet premiere of The Wings of Autumn. Her smile was bright but her eyes flat as she posed at Damian’s side like a trophy, both generations of Stanton women at her right. She was freezing over right in front of my eyes, each picture a little colder than the last.
“And the thing is,” she continued with a little shake of her head and another mocking smile, “you don’t always recognize that wet sound for what it is—an assassination. You don’t register what’s actually happening as the air disappears. You hear that gurgle, and it somehow convinces you that the next breath is coming—you’re not broken. This is fixable, right? So you fight, holding on to whatever air there is.” Her eyes filled with unshed tears, but she raised her chin and held them back as the pages flew by with every sentence. “You fight and you thrash because this fated, deep-rooted thing you called love refuses to go down with a single shot. That would be far too merciful. Real love has to be choked out, held under the water until it stops kicking. That’s the only way to kill it.”
She flipped again and again, the album a color-streaked kaleidoscope of photos she’d obviously chosen with great care to send Scarlett, constructing the lie of a happy marriage.
“And once you finally get it, finally stop fighting, you’re too far gone to get to the surface to save yourself. And the spectators tell you to keep swimming, that it’s only a broken heart, but that little flicker that’s left of your soul can’t even float, let alone tread water. So you’re left with a choice. You either let yourself die while they accuse you of being weak or you learn to breathe the goddamn water, and then they call you a monster for what you become. Ice Queen, indeed.”
She stopped on the last picture—this one a mirror of the first premiere, taken only a couple months before Scarlett’s death. The rest of the pages in the album were devastatingly blank.
My hands clenched. I had never wanted to beat the shit out of someone the way I did Damian Ellsworth. “I swear, I would never hurt you like he did.” I ground out every word, hoping she registered my conviction.
“I never said he did,” she whispered, two lines forming between her eyebrows as she glanced at me with confusion.
The doorbell rang, startling us both.
“I’ll get it,” I offered, pushing to my feet.
“I’m on it.” She scrambled, the photo album sliding off her lap as she beat me to stand, barely pausing before she raced for the door, nimbly dodging the piles of photos.
I watched from the doorway as she signed for the package. If I hadn’t been sitting next to her, I never would have guessed she’d just unloaded the way she had. Her polished smile was at the ready as she made polite small talk with the driver.
She took the substantial box and said her goodbyes, closing the door with her hip before setting the box on the entry hall table.
“It’s from the lawyers,” she said with a grin, and I wondered for a second if she’d lost her mind. No one was ever that happy to get a box from their attorneys. “Hold on a second; I need scissors.”
“Here.” I stepped forward, whipping my Gerber out of my pocket and opening the knife attachment so I could offer it to her. “I thought you didn’t close on the new studio for another two weeks?” I couldn’t wait to see what she created.
“Thanks.” She took the tool, then ripped into the package with childlike glee. “It’s not for the studio. She sends me something every month.”
“Your lawyer?”
“No, Gran.” Her smile was brighter than any I’d seen from her as she pried back the edge of the box. “She left directions and gifts. So far it’s been about once a month, but I don’t know how long she planned it out.”
“That might be the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.” I took the Gerber back, secured the blade, and slipped it into the pocket of my cargo pants.
“It really is,” she agreed, ripping open a card. “Dearest Georgia, now that I’m gone, it’s up to you to be the witch of the house, no matter where you are. I love you with all my heart, Gran.”
My eyebrows shot up at the witch comment until Georgia laughed and
pulled a witch’s hat from the box.
“She always dressed up like a witch to hand out candy to the kids on Halloween.” She plunked the hat on her head, right over her bun, and kept digging.
Right. Halloween was in two weeks. Time was flying, my deadline approaching, and I was still empty-handed. Worse than that, I only had six weeks left with Georgia if I turned the manuscript in on time, which I would.
“She sent you a witch hat and a case of king-size Snickers?” I asked, feeling oddly connected to Scarlett Stanton in that moment as I peered into the box.
Georgia nodded. “Want one?” She plucked a bar from the box and waved it.
“Absolutely.” I wanted Georgia, but I’d settle for the bar.
“They were Gran’s favorites,” she said as we peeled our wrappers. “But she said they were called Marathon bars back in England. I can’t even begin to tell you how many pages of her manuscripts had little chocolate fingerprints at the edges.”
I bit into the bar, then chewed as I followed Georgia back into the office. “All on that typewriter.”
“Yep.” She peered at me with a tilted head, studying me carefully. “Chocolate on my face?” I asked, taking another bite.
“You should write the rest of the book here.”
“I am, remember? There’s no way in hell I’m going back to New York without a finished manuscript. Pretty sure Adam wouldn’t even let me off the plane.” As it was, I was ducking his calls left and right. Pretty soon he’d be out here, too, if I didn’t pick up.
“I mean…here, here,” she said, motioning toward Scarlett’s desk. “Gran’s office, here. It’s where she worked on it.”
I blinked. “You want me to finish the book in here?” The words came out slowly, stumbling over my own confusion.
She took another bite and nodded, glancing around the room. “Mm-
hmm.”
“I don’t always write on a typical schedule…” But I’d be close to Georgia every day.
“So? You have a key. I won’t always be here, anyway, not with getting the studio set up. And if it’s ever ridiculously late, you can crash in a guest bedroom.” She shrugged and hopped over two piles of photos on her way to the desk. “The more I think about it, the more it fits.” She walked behind the desk and pulled out the chair. “Come on—try it on for size.”
I polished off the chocolate bar and tossed the wrapper in the trash can beside the massive cherry desk, hesitating. That was Scarlett’s desk. Scarlett’s typewriter. “You protect that thing like it’s the Resolute desk, coasters and all.”
“Oh, you still have to use coasters. That’s nonnegotiable.” She tapped the high back of the chair and laughed. “Come on, it won’t bite.”
“Right.” I rounded the corner and sank into the office chair, then pulled myself forward so I sat at the desk. Georgia’s laptop lay closed to my right, but on my left sat the famed typewriter.
“If you’re feeling bold…” Georgia ran her fingers over the keys.
“No, thank you. First, I’d probably break it, and second, I make way too many corrections as I go to ever think about using a typewriter. That’s hard- core, even for me.” My eyes caught on the shirt box on the edge of the desk. It was labeled “UNFINISHED” in thick, black marker. “Is that…”
“The originals? Yeah.” She slid the box my way. “Go ahead, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one. Originals stay here.”
“Noted.” I flipped the top off, then lifted the stack of papers to the polished surface of the desk. She’d typed these pages herself, and here I was, getting ready to finish them. Surreal.
The manuscript was thick, but it wasn’t only the word count that stacked up the pages but the pages themselves. I thumbed through quickly. “This is amazing.”
“I’ve got another seventy-three boxes just like it,” she teased, leaning back against the desk.
“You can actually see her write it, then revise. The pages are all in different stages of aging. See?” I held up two pages from Chapter Two, when Jameson had just approached Scarlett where she sat with Constance. “This page here has to be the original. It’s aged, and the quality of the paper is lower. This page”—I waved it slightly, my lips tugging up at the smudge of chocolate at the edge—“can’t be more than a decade old.”
“Makes sense. She liked to revise, always added word count.” She braced her hands on the edge of the desk. “Personally, I think she liked living there, between the pages with him. Always adding little bits of memory but never closing the door.”
That was something I understood. Closing out a book meant I said goodbye to those characters. But they weren’t just characters to Scarlett. They’d been her sister. Her soul mate. I read a few sentences from the first page, then the second. “Damn, you can actually see her skill evolve.”
“Really?” Georgia adjusted slightly, turning her head to see the pages. “Yeah. Every writer has a particular flow to their sentence structure. See
here,” I pointed to a spot on the first page. “Slightly choppier. By here,” I selected a different passage on the second, “she smoothed out.” I’d bet my life that the first pages most closely resembled the style of her early works. I glanced up to find Georgia’s eyes on me.
She failed at stifling a smile.
“What?” I asked, slipping the pages back into the manuscript where they belonged.
“Now you have chocolate on your face.” She laughed softly. “Awesome.” I swiped my hand over the stubble closest to my mouth. “Here.” She slid along the desk, the bare skin of her legs brushing
against mine.
I suddenly wished I’d worn shorts as I rolled back slightly, hoping she’d come closer.
She filled the space between my knees, cupped the side of my face, and brushed her thumb over the patch of skin just below the corner of my mouth. My pulse kicked up a notch, and my body went tight.
“There,” she whispered, but didn’t move her hand.
“Thanks.” Her touch was warm, and it took everything I had not to lean in to it. Damn, I wanted her, and not just her body. I wanted inside her mind, past the walls even George R.R. Martin would be proud of. I wanted her trust simply so I could prove I was worthy of it.
She swept the tip of her tongue over her lower lip.
My self-control hung by a thread, and the look in her eyes was slowly pulling at the edges of it, fraying the strands.
Still, she didn’t move.
“Georgia.” Her name came out as both a plea and a warning. She moved closer. Not close enough.
My hands found the curves of her waist and I tugged, bringing her as close as the chair allowed.
Her breath caught in a tiny gasp that sent all the blood in my body straight to my dick. Calm the hell down. She slid her hand along my jaw and into my hair.
My grip tightened on her waist through the thick fabric of her sweatshirt.
“Noah,” she whispered, lifting her other hand to hold the back of my neck.
“Do you want me to kiss you, Georgia?” My voice was rough, even to my own ears. There could be no mistake here. No mixed signals. There was too much riding on this, and for once, it wasn’t my career I was thinking about.
“Do you want to kiss me?” she challenged.
“More than I want my next breath.” My gaze dropped to that incredible mouth, and her lips parted.
“Good, because—” Her phone rang.
You have got to be kidding me.
She shifted, leaning closer. Another ring.
“Don’t—” I started.
With a groan, she ripped her phone from her back pocket, then sucked in a breath as her eyes narrowed at her screen. She swiped violently, answering the call and lifting the device to her ear.
“—answer it,” I finished with a sigh, letting my head fall back against the chair.
“What the hell do you want, Damian?”
