Her eyes as big as a kid’s in a candy store, Roxie moved through a dozen vignettes, each one done in a different period, from early nineteenth century to art nouveau to midcentury modern to contemporary. “Where do you find all this stuff?”
“Estate sales, buying trips overseas. Wherever. You like it?”
“Are you kidding? I love it. All of it.” She picked up a gorgeous art deco painted glass vase. “Especially since this is so not our mothers’ antique store.”
“You got it. Nice to know our tastes still mesh as well as they did when we were sharing that dinky house near campus.”
Roxie howled. “Ohmigosh, now I’m gonna have nightmares for a week. God, that place was ugly.”
“Hey. At the time we thought we were seriously stylin’. That lime-green bathroom rocked, baby.”
“Because it went so well with the burnt-orange shag carpet in the rest of the house.”
“No, it distracted from the orange shag. As did the purple walls.”
Roxie held up one finger. “Not purple. Grape Mist.”
“Thank God there’s no evidence. If there’d been Facebook then, my career would be screwed—”
Elise’s cell rang. She pulled it out of a hidden pocket in her sweater tent, chuckling when she checked the number. “The hubster. Suffers from heavy-duty pregnancy guilt, poor baby. Checks in at least once an hour to see how I’m doing. This won’t take long. Go ahead and keep looking around.”
The sting came out of nowhere. Honestly. Here she was, dream job landed, reconnected with a great friend…and about to tip over the edge from somebody else’s domestic bliss? So lame.
Wasn’t as if you left anything behind in Tierra Rosa, right?
If you didn’t count her heart, not a thing.
She’d get over it, of course. Over Noah. Pining for what wasn’t rightfully hers—and never had been—wasn’t her style. God knew she was nothing if not a survivor, that for all its wounds, her heart kept on beating…and would find its way back to her, as it always had before.
Her life as a Celine Dion song. Yay, a new low.
“Rox? Hey. What’s up?”
She spun around to find Elise frowning at her with don’tmess-with-me eyes. Too bad. “I think last night just caught up with me.”
“Tell me about it,” her friend said, yawning, then waved her toward the door. “Definitely seeing naps in both of our near futures. Oh, by the way…” She let Rox out first, then set the alarm before following. “Wanna check out a couple of local estate sales this weekend?”
Roxie glanced back, her thumb jerked over her shoulder. “Because it’s not crammed to the rafters already in there?”
“Believe it or not, it doesn’t stick around. If a piece doesn’t find a home with a client or sell off the floor within three months, I eBay it. So there’s always room for more! So, you up for some shopping?”
“Bring it on,” Rox said, embracing the thrill of the hunt. That old optimism that everything she wanted was simply waiting for her to find it. And while she was at it? Maybe she could find a spare heart for cheap.
’Cause she needed to plug up this hole in her chest, fast.
For as long as Noah could remember Christmas mornings at his parents’ house had been crazy. Factor in six grandkids under the age of seven, and it was flat-out insane. In the best definition of the word.
And normally Noah was right on the floor with them, tossing wadded up wrapping paper at his brothers and making Blue bark and his mom go, “Noah, for pity’s sake!” at least every thirty seconds. This Christmas, however, even though he was still on the floor, still laughing when the kids crawled all over him, still genuinely touched by his mother’s uncanny ability to give them all exactly the right gifts whether they’d dropped hints or not…he simply wasn’t feeling the joy.
Nor was he doing a particularly good job of hiding it, if the not-so-subtle exchanged glances between assorted adult members of the family was any indication.
At long last the Great Christmas Carnage was over, the kids had all claimed assorted corners of the family room to play with their new toys, and all the females except Tess, who was feeding the baby, had swarmed into the kitchen where his mother was hollering out who wanted bacon and who wanted sausage, and did everybody want French toast or pancakes, she could do either, it wasn’t any bother.
Exactly like every Christmas since he could remember.
Only this year, Noah felt as if somebody’d ripped a hole in his heart the size of the Grand Canyon. How the morning could make him miss Roxie so much, when she’d never been a part of his family’s Christmases, he had no idea. But for damn sure, he wasn’t “getting over” her. If anything, every day the painful irony only got worse.
Silas plopped beside him on the beat-up sectional, lightly slapping Noah’s knee before crossing his arms high on his chest, his brows dipped behind his glasses. Groaning, Noah let his head drop back on the cushions.
“Let me guess—you drew the short straw.”
“Oh, they didn’t even bother with straws, just pointed and said, ‘You’re the oldest, you go talk to him.’”
“Nothing to talk about.”
“Bull. You look like a dog left behind at the pound. Come on.” Silas slapped Noah’s knee again as he got up. “Get your coat, we’re going outside.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
“It’s me or Mom. Choose wisely, grasshopper.”
Pushing out a heavy breath, Noah heaved himself out of the nice, soft cushions, grabbed his coat off the arm of the sofa and followed his brother outside into the frigid, blue-skied morning, the sun glinting off patches of frozen snow.
“Here’s a news flash, bro,” Silas said before they got to the end of the walk. “It’s not a crime to be in love.”
Nothing like coming straight to the point. “What makes you think—?”
“You’re not seriously gonna argue?”
Noah was quiet for a long moment, then said, “I honest-to-God never thought it would happen. Not to me.”
“So I gathered.”
Jiggling his keys in his coat pocket, Noah frowned at his brother. “Except…if this is love, how come it hurts so much?”
Silas quietly chuckled. “You remember how we used to wrestle? When we were kids?”
“Like I could forget. I’ve still got bruises.”
“As does Mom, I’m sure. But do you also remember that the more you struggled after you got pinned, the more it hurt?”
“And that if I didn’t I’d get creamed. Or suffocate.”
“Okay, so maybe not the best analogy. Still. Love’s a lot like that. Once you stop resisting, it stops hurting. So.” Silas crossed his arms. “You got any idea why you’re fighting so hard?”
Another several seconds passed before Noah released another, softer, “I think so, yeah.”
“Care to share?”
Noah’s gaze landed on Charley’s house across the street, a house without Roxie, as he wrestled with himself, about whether or not to give voice to the phantom thoughts he’d kept locked up in the back of his brain for so long he’d almost stopped hearing them. Until some curly-headed gal unwittingly unlocked their cage and set them free to run amok, screaming like freaking banshees in his ear.
“What difference does it make?” he said, his voice as harsh as the wind whipping down their ice-covered street. “I’m here. She’s not. I can’t leave, and I sure can’t ask her to come back. Especially since…”
“Go on.”
Noah looked away, his breath frosting around his mouth. “Since I seriously doubt I could ever live up to the example our folks set.”
Silas gawked at him. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Nope.”
“Wow. Nothing like being a little hard on yourself.”
“It’s called being realistic. And honest. And Roxie…no way would she ever settle for something half-assed. Or should she.”
Silas flipped up his jacket collar against
the back of his neck, the wind ruffling his hair. “So…the feelings are mutual?”
“Yeah,” Noah said, already irritated for having said as much as he had. Although the release felt good, too. Then he laughed. “All the boneheaded things I used to do without even batting an eye? This makes me feel like I’m gonna hurl. That I don’t know how to love somebody, that I’d screw it up, that I’ve already screwed up. That…” He pushed a swallow past his constricted throat, the wind making his eyes sting. “That I’ve lost her.”
His gaze swung to Silas, who was angled away from him with his hands shoved in his pockets and his head bent, his mouth set. His brother’s “thinking hard” pose, he knew. “Before,” Noah went on, his heart knocking against his ribs, “either I knew I’d succeed or it didn’t matter. But this…” The frigid air scraped his lungs when he hauled in a breath. “I don’t have an idea in hell whether I’d be any good at this or not. And failure’s not an option.”
Several beats passed before Silas released a breath, then looked at Noah again, his expression more relaxed. “For what it’s worth, we’ve all been there. Nothing scarier than putting your heart out there.”
“But you got married anyway. All of you. Even Jesse, and he was only eighteen, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t discount ignorance,” Silas said on a short, dry laugh. “It definitely has its uses.” He glanced out at the street again. “What about kids?”
Yeah. That. Noah gave his head a sharp shake. “How one woman could turn everything I believed about myself on its head…I don’t get it.”
“Nobody does,” Silas said, sympathetically clamping a hand on his shoulder. “Not that everyone who falls in love automatically thinks ‘I wanna make babies with this person,’ but it happens often enough to keep the species going.” He let go to lean against the chunky stone pillar housing an old gas lantern that hadn’t worked in years. “All of us go into this commitment thing blind,” he said, “even when we think we’ve got a clue. And Mom and Dad would be the first ones to say that.”
Noah frowned. “But…after Amy…?”
“How did I find the courage to try again?” He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s so much about finding it, as it is not ducking fast enough before it clobbers you over the head. It’s just this voice that says…this is right. Along with, I suppose, a determination to keep it right. Of course, both people have to be on the same page about that,” he said with a slight grimace, referring—Noah assumed—to his first wife’s definite lack in that department.
“Dad! Uncle Noah!” Sunlight glanced off Ollie’s straight blond hair when he opened the front door. “Gramma says to tell you breakfast’s ready!”
“Coming, squirt,” Silas said, then looked back at Noah. “So what are you going to do?”
“Hang myself?” Noah said, plowing his fingers through his hair. “It’s not like I can simply up and leave, is it? All those years I’ve busted my buns to prove to Dad he can count on me…what can I do? Tell him, after less than a month, I’ve changed my mind? That some girl is more important than the business he spent his entire adult life building?”
“Is that all Roxie is? Some girl?”
His face heating, Noah looked away. “If she was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Air left his lungs in a huge rush. “Man, am I between a rock and a hard place, or what?”
“Sure looks like it,” Silas said, not being helpful at all. “But on the upside, at least now we all know you’re human.”
“Butthead,” Noah muttered at his brother’s grin, hugely tempted to cram a fistful of snow down his collar.
“You sure you don’t want me to help?” Roxie asked Elise’s husband, Patrick, as he carted off what was left of the ham to the kitchen. Both sets of Elise’s and Patrick’s boisterous, energetic parents had already gone, leaving behind a startled calm and a boatload of dirty dishes.
The gangly, graying blonde plunked the platter on the counter dividing the living area from the kitchen in their fabulous, eclectically furnished condo overlooking the Colorado River. “Nope. Got it covered.”
“But you did all the cooking, you should let me do something.”
“What you can do,” Patrick said with a wide, slightly gap-toothed smile, “is keep Her Royal Highness from waddling in here and telling me I’m not loading the dishwasher right.”
“It’s true,” Elise said with a shrug from her perch on the tangerine-colored sofa, her puffy, fuzzy-socked feet stretched out in front of her. “I would. Because he tosses the dishes in there any old way, no respect for order at all.”
Laughing, Roxie sank into the other end of the sofa, soaking in the soft glow of the colored lights on the retro silver aluminum Christmas tree and trying desperately to hang onto something that almost passed for contentment. It had been a lovely, lazy day, filled with laughter and friends and ending in the most amazing meal she’d ever eaten in her life. She absolutely loved her job. And in a week she’d be moving into her new apartment, an adorable one-bedroom in a quirky old Queen Anne not far from work.
Only then she’d have to return to Tierra Rosa to get her stuff out of storage, a thought which made the contentment go poof. So to distract herself she focused on Patrick’s bustling about the kitchen, humming to himself as he worked.
Big mistake.
“You’ve got a real keeper there,” she said, not even trying to keep the wistfulness out of her voice.
Elise tried to shift, winced, then sighed a happy sigh. “And don’t I know it. Although I had to kiss a hella lot of frogs before I found him. Astounding, the number of losers out there…oh. Sorry,” she said, grimacing as she apparently remembered Jeff. “Can I blame it on the pregnancy?”
“Sure. And it’s okay. I’m more than over him, believe me.”
Oops.
Elise nudged Roxie’s thigh with her foot. “And who is it you’re not over?”
“I have no idea what—”
“Hey.” Spearing Roxie with her dark, way-too-astute gaze, Elise said, “I’m sending you to Italy next month, last thing I need is you ending up in Bulgaria by mistake because some dude keeps pulling you to La La Land. So what’s going on?”
It’d been years since she’d thought of how her mother could immediately tell when something was amiss, how a simple, “What’s wrong?” could reduce Roxie to tears. Fighting the suckers now, she said, “Other than managing to once again fall in love with the absolutely worst possible person for me? Not a thing.”
“You really need to stop doing that,” Elise said, and Roxie sputtered a laugh. “So how did this one rate on the ol’ Jerk-o-meter? Assuming Jeffrey was, what? A ten?”
“Ten, hell. Try twelve. And to be honest, I’d assumed Noah was at least a seven, maybe even an eight.”
Elise handed her a box of tissues off the end table. “But…?”
“But it turns out he’s actually…pretty darn close to perfect. Except for one or two tiny things.”
“Oh, hell…he’s gay.”
Roxie laughed again, even as she dabbed at her leaking eyes. “Um, no. But he is allergic to white picket fences.”
“Oh, sweetie…” Elise held out her hand, wagging for Roxie to take it. “I’m so sorry,” she said with a gentle squeeze. “I’d give you a hug, but bending forward ain’t happening these days.” Then she whispered, “Was the sex good, at least?”
“We never got that far.”
“You sure he’s not gay?”
“My decision, not his. Because I knew…” She swiped at a hot tear trickling down her cheek. “Well. It seemed like a good idea at the t-time.”
With great effort, Elise slowly swung her feet off the couch to sit up, gesturing for Roxie to scoot over so she could give her that hug, at which point Patrick—who’d known Roxie for all of two weeks and had clearly heard the entire conversation—mumbled something about men being dumb as bricks, which only opened the floodgates.
Because when it came to dumb, Roxie had ’em all beat, han
ds down.
“Do you believe this snow?” Noah’s father said, stomping the damn stuff off his feet as he came inside the shop, his grin broad in a face still tan from the cruise.
Plans for a new project spread out on a drafting table right inside the door, Noah grunted. Normally he greeted the first snowfall of the season like an excited little kid, champing at the bit for snowball fights and sledding parties, rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of navigating his truck through snow-choked, winding mountain roads. But this January—the snowiest on record, for which the New Mexico ski industry was extremely grateful—it only made him grumpy as hell.
“Everything okay?” Gene asked, stuffing his gloves inside his coat pocket.
Noah pushed his mouth into a smile. “Yeah. Fine.”
At least on this front it was. Apparently, Gene’s forced vacation had made him look at things from a whole new angle. Including, as it happened, Noah. Not a day passed that his father didn’t tell him how well he was doing, how pleased he was. In fact, whenever Noah tried to defer to his dad when the old man was around, Gene backed off, saying, “Whatever you think is best, I trust you.” Who’dathunkit?
So now he waved his father toward the back of the shop. “Go take a look at the order Benito and them are working on, it’s turning out fantastic.”
But as his father trundled off—whistling, for God’s sake—Noah’s smile quickly crumpled into a glower. Because nothing felt right anymore. Felt like home. Ever since Christmas, when he’d admitted out loud how bad he had it for Roxie, his skull had felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. And with every day that passed the discontent only grew deeper, choking out even the supreme satisfaction of proving to his father—and, okay, himself—that he was damn good at what he did. That, by making sure he had the best crew ever working with him, he could even juggle both the cabinetry and construction arms of the business.
And not drop a single ball.
By rights he should have been on top of the world. Victorious and vindicated. Instead, he simply felt…empty. Empty and alone and frustrated beyond belief.
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