by Noelle Adams
And she was definitely watching him. Her eyes never left his face as he approached. After a minute, she gave him a little smile.
She was absolutely gorgeous. He was already imagining what she might be like in bed.
The airline had lost his luggage. His sister wasn’t expecting him for another week. If he stayed in Roanoke for the night, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
At least some fun with this hot little package might salvage this trip.
“Hello,” he said, coming over to stand beside her with a practiced smile that always worked on women.
“Hi,” she said, that little smile still hovering on her lips. “Did you just fly in?”
“Yeah.” When the bartender came over, Noah ordered a beer. Then he leaned a little closer to the woman. “They lost my damned luggage.”
“Annoying.” She was watching him in a strange way, but he loved the way her soft brown eyes rested on his face. Like she saw more in him than most people, like she wanted to see even more. “How are you?” she asked.
It was an odd question, but he was just happy to keep talking to her. “I’m doing pretty well now.” He took a swallow of his beer. “You’ve got the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”
He’d learned early on that the eyes were the best thing to compliment a woman on. The body was considered too sexual and thus too suggestive. The skin was too personal, and the hair wasn’t personal enough. The eyes were exactly right, and in this case it happened to be true.
They were beautiful eyes—like liquid chocolate.
Her cheeks flushed prettily, and she dropped her eyes. “Thank you.”
Even more enchanted than ever, Noah repositioned himself and reached over to lift her chin. “I’m Noah.”
Something changed on her face. It grew oddly still. “Noah,” she murmured.
“Yes. You can say my name any time you like.” He paused, and when she didn’t reply, he asked, “What’s your name?”
The soft look in her eyes disappeared, replaced by something else, something he didn’t understand.
What the hell had just happened?
She’d been into him. Totally into him. He wasn’t a fool, and he knew how to recognize it. And now it was like she’d just shut down.
He didn’t want her to shut down on him. He wanted her all soft and flushed like she’d been before. He used a husky murmur that he knew women liked as he said, “You don’t have to give me your name if you don’t want to.”
Her shoulders had stiffened, and she turned her head away from him. It looked like she was breathing unevenly.
Damn it. He’d lost her, and he had no idea why.
Before he could say anything else, a voice called out from behind them, “Emma! Emma!”
Emma.
Something sparked in his mind. Something that should be significant.
He turned around and saw a familiar face.
Patrick was older now, and he wasn’t as skinny as he’d been in high school. But his features and smile were familiar as he hurried over to the bar, rolling a small suitcase and carrying a leather bag.
One of Noah’s best friends since childhood.
One of his only friends.
But Patrick’s eyes weren’t focused on Noah. They were focused on the woman beside him.
Emma.
Noah gasped as it finally caught up to him.
Emma. Emma. Patrick’s little sister.
Little Pudge.
He’d just been standing here coming onto plain, chubby little Emma, who was always lurking around, wearing baggy clothes and staring at him.
She wasn’t plain or chubby anymore.
Patrick had glanced over at him, and his face changed with recognition. “Noah? Damn, man, why didn’t you let us know you were coming?” He pulled to a stop, his expression altering yet again. “Or did you know?” His eyes moved from Emma to Noah suspiciously.
“Of course I didn’t know,” Emma said, evidently rousing herself to respond to the situation. “We just happened to run into each other.”
“Y-yeah. I almost didn’t recognize her after so long,” Noah managed to say, his mind buzzing from surprise and disorientation and a strange kind of embarrassment.
He was never embarrassed.
He didn’t like it.
Emma slanted him a look that was decidedly cold. She obviously resented the fact that he hadn’t recognized her, but how the hell was he supposed to know this gorgeous woman was Patrick’s little sister, Pudge?
And what the hell was he supposed to do with the fact that he was still hopelessly attracted to her, that he was seeing her as anything but a little sister?
Patrick had relaxed, evidently assuming that nothing untoward had happened between his friend and his sister. He grinned at Noah. “Emma’s here to pick me up. I guess she probably told you that. If you don’t have a car, you can ride along with us.”
Noah gulped down the rest of his beer. “I’m waiting to hear about my luggage.”
Patrick waved to the bartender and asked for a beer himself. “Well, we’ll wait with you. You don’t mind, do you, Emma? Man, I can’t believe you’re here after so long. We have so much to catch up on.”
Noah swallowed over his discomfort and resigned himself to a long chat.
***
Forty minutes later, Emma got behind the wheel of her brother’s car, trying not to look at Noah sitting in the back seat.
He was an asshole. An absolute asshole.
He looked even better than he had when he was younger. He’d always been fit and athletic, but he was broader across the shoulders now, with obvious power in his stride, in his stance. His hair wasn’t as fair as Ginny’s, but there were golden glints in the brown, picked up by the sunlight. And his eyes were the same dark green as his sister’s. He was clean shaven and wearing a black suit that looked very expensive.
Noah Hart. Sitting in the back seat of her brother’s car.
Home again after all these years.
But not the man she used to know.
He’d always been ambitious, competitive. But he’d also been friendly, funny, almost warm. He’d been smarter than he’d wanted to let on all through high school, and he’d loved to laugh.
Now he was nothing but cool.
He hadn’t even known who she was, and he’d come on to her like she was just some random woman at a bar.
She tried to push aside her hurt feelings and be reasonable about it. It had been seven years since he’d seen her. Nine years since he’d seen her regularly. And she did look a lot different. She’d gotten in better shape, her skin had cleared up, and she’d finally gotten her braces off.
But still…
She was his best friend’s sister. He should know who she was when he saw her.
She hadn’t believed it when he’d approached her at the bar with that warm look in his eyes. He’d told her she had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen.
She’d thought he’d meant it. She’d thought he’d known who she was.
It had been like a slash to the heart when she realized she was just a stranger to him.
It didn’t matter.
It absolutely didn’t matter.
Noah didn’t matter to her.
He was only here because he’d been guilted into it. He wouldn’t have come at all if he’d had his way.
He cared more about business and flirting with strangers than he did about his hometown and old friends. She didn’t want that kind of man. She wanted a nice guy who cared about the things she cared about.
She didn’t give a damn about whether he’d recognized her or not.
She wasn’t going to think about him.
She was going to get through this forty-five minute car ride back to Blacksburg, and then she was going to forget he existed.
Anyway she was on a Man-Fast.
And that meant fasting from thoughts of Noah Hart.
Two
The next morning, Noah woke up in his
old bedroom, and the familiar smell caused a knot in his stomach even before he opened his eyes.
He, Ginny, and their mother had moved into this house with his grandmother when Noah was twelve and his father walked out on them.
He’d lived here until he graduated high school.
His mother should be in the kitchen, working on her laptop at the table with a cup of coffee.
But she was dead now.
It was still early. When he walked to the other side of the house, the kitchen would be dark and empty.
He hadn’t slept well. He’d been haunted by visuals of Emma, sitting on the bar stool with her bare, sexy legs crossed, smiling at him with that soft smile, those full lips.
How the hell had little Pudge turned into that woman? It made no sense at all.
Patrick would be furious if he knew Noah was fantasizing about his little sister—and getting hard in response to those fantasies—so Noah tried to rein in his thoughts. All night he tried.
As a result, he hadn’t gotten much sleep, and his body was plagued by a bad case of physical frustration—frustration that would find no relief any time soon.
He exerted all the control he could muster and cleared his mind as he got out of bed. He pulled on a pair of sweatpants with his high school team written across the ass—since his luggage had never made an appearance—and walked down the hall toward the coffee pot.
His grandmother’s house was a brick ranch, built in the sixties. When Noah was a kid, the house had been in the country, but Blacksburg had grown a lot in the intervening years and the old house was now surrounded by newer developments.
Nan, his grandmother, wouldn’t move though. He and Ginny had tried to convince her to move into a local assisted living place a few years ago, but she’d absolutely refused. So Ginny still lived in the house with her.
The kitchen was still decorated from the eighties with white appliances, white cabinets, and blue Formica countertops. When Noah walked in, he was surprised to see that Ginny was sitting at the kitchen table, working on her laptop.
“Morning,” she said with a smile.
“You’re up early.”
“I’m so excited about the opening that I wake up at the crack of dawn.”
“Oh, yeah. Everything’s going well with that?”
“We’ve done everything we can. Now we’re just hoping for the best.”
“I’m sure it will be fine. Even if you have a slow start, you’ll build up business. It’s a good area for a tearoom.”
“I know. It’s perfect, with Virginia Tech in town and so many college students and academics hanging around. Surely some of them will be tea connoisseurs.”
“And some will be Anglophobes who like anything that seems British. I wouldn’t have invested if it hadn’t been a good idea and you hadn’t had a good business plan.” He’d gotten his coffee now, hot, black, and strong, and was leaning against the counter.
When his sister had come to him with the proposal, he would have given her money on the venture, no matter what it happened to be. Just because she was his sister. But he’d been shocked by how professional and financially savvy the business plan had been. Ginny had never been a money person, but she’d clearly understood everything in the proposal.
Ventures like the tearoom were always a risk, but she and her friend had definitely done their homework with this one. He was impressed. And proud of Ginny.
“Well,” she said with a quick flash of the dimple she’d always had next to her mouth. “Emma put the business plan together for us.”
His felt a rush of blood in his head, in his chest, all through his body, at the mention of her name. “Emma did?”
“Yeah. She’s the money person. You know she handles all the financial stuff for Patrick’s company, don’t you?”
“Oh. Yes. I guess I’d heard that.” Noah was sure he should have known that, but he’d never really put the pieces together before.
Patrick’s company was a real success. And that business plan for the tearoom had been top-notch.
Emma clearly knew what she was doing.
It was still hard for him to wrap his mind around the fact that this was the same little girl he’d known before.
Ginny was looking at him curiously. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and she was wearing a pair of tortoise shell glasses. “What are you all uptight about?”
“I’m not uptight.”
“You think I don’t know my own brother? Of course you’re uptight. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” The last thing he could do was give his sister any hint of the direction of his thoughts concerning Emma. So he extemporized, “It’s just strange being back is all.”
“Well, you should have been back many times before this.”
“I offer to bring you and Nan out to visit me all the time. You only accept occasionally, and Nan never accepts.” For as long as he could remember, everyone had called his grandmother Nan.
“Nan won’t travel. You know that. And I have work and a life here. I can’t just drop everything to come see you because you feel guilty.”
“I don’t feel guilty,” Noah said with a frown.
“Yes, you do. Why do you even bother arguing? We both know perfectly well that you feel guilty about not coming home to see me and Nan and Ryan and Patrick and everyone who knows and loves you. So you temper the guilt by offering to fly me all over the world to visit you.”
Noah turned around to brew himself another cup of coffee. The knot he’d felt in his stomach since waking up grew tighter, heavier.
Of course, Ginny was right. She almost always was.
Most of the time, Noah felt like a selfish asshole for never coming home.
“We miss you, you know,” Ginny said, after waiting a minute. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“So maybe you come and visit more often then?”
“I’ll try.”
He expected a snide response to this from his sister, but she didn’t give him one. She just sat in her chair and studied him.
Finally, she asked in a different tone, “What’s so hard about it?”
He knew exactly what she meant, but he didn’t want to answer, so he stalled. “Hard about what?”
“You know what I mean. What’s so hard about coming home? I know it’s not that you don’t want to see me and Nan, so what is it?”
She was his sister, and he loved her, and she deserved an answer, so he tried to give her one. “There’s just… nothing left for me here.”
“That’s not true. Your best friends are here. Me and Nan are here. All your memories of Mom are here.”
He swallowed hard. “I know.”
“It can’t be Mom because you were running for a couple of years before she died. So I guess it must be Dad then.”
“Ginny.” There was a warning in the one soft word.
“Don’t try to sound all cool and intimidating. You can’t scare me anymore, Noah. Dad’s just a boring, selfish, middle-aged man. He shouldn’t still be steering your life.
“He’s not steering my life.”
“Yeah, I think he is. He left us. He didn’t want us anymore. He got a new family and evidently liked them better. He prefers to forget we exist most of the time. It happened. There’s nothing we can do about it now. We might as well let it go.”
Noah’s chest was hurting so much he could barely breathe, but he managed to lift his eyebrows in a sardonic expression. “And you’re saying it hasn’t had an effect on you? Just how close are you to trusting a man with your heart after his abandoning us that way?”
Ginny went out with guys all the time, but she hadn’t dated anyone seriously since college. She would have told him if she had.
Ginny gave him a wobbly little smile. “I trust you, even though you never want to come home.”
The emotion in Noah’s throat was too much, and he made a strange noise as he stepped over to his sister. She stood up, evidently responding
to the expression on his face, and he pulled her into a hug.
“I’m sorry, Ginny,” he mumbled.
“I know.” Her voice was muffled by his T-shirt. She wasn’t normally an emotional person, so he knew she was feeling this deeply. “I know you are. I understand. I really do.” She pulled away, clearing her throat. “But I don’t want you to keep running away just because life hurt you here. Maybe I’m running away from some things in the relationship department, but I’m still happy here. And I can’t help but think you’d be happier here too with your family and friends instead of always off pretending to be a big shot who can’t be hurt anymore.”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“Oh, just stop it. Save your lies for silly women and the people you’re selling stuff to.”
Noah let out a long breath. “I thought you just wanted me to visit. Now you’re saying I’m supposed to move back here?”
“Well, visiting more often would be a first step. But I’m telling you, there are all kinds of upcoming businesses in this area who could use a first-rate closer like you. You could find a job without blinking your eyes.”
For just a moment, Noah liked the idea. He could see himself living here, close to Nan and Ginny, Patrick and Ryan.
When he thought about Emma, he shook the thought away. “Don’t hold your breath on that one.”
“Fine, fine. I’m not giving up hope, but I won’t nag you about it. You’ll stop by the tearoom later today, won’t you? I want to show you everything we’ve done.”
“Sure. I promised Nan I’d take her to do errands this morning, but I’ll stop by this afternoon.”
***
Emma and Patrick had moved their IT company into an office suite in downtown Blacksburg last year, when their profits had really started taking off. The suite was bright and airy with high ceilings and a urban loft style—a large central reception area surrounded by six offices and a conference room.
Emma loved her own office, and she still got a little thrill every morning when she came in to see the wall of windows, the big old desk she’d found at a flea market, and the bright pops of color in the area rug and the art on the walls.