Stardust Valley (Firefly Hollow Book 9)

by T. L. Haddix

  Chapter Seventeen

  Noah had just finished stoking up the woodstove when Fig, who was keeping watch over his activities from the back of the couch, growled. In a flash, she was upstairs. He turned, frowning, just in time to see headlights flash across the front of the house.

  “What in the world?”

  Sophie hadn’t been gone two minutes, and it was nearly eleven o’clock, much too late for a casual visitor. When he peered through the window beside the door and saw Sophie getting out of her car, his frown turned into a worried scowl. “She must have forgotten something.” He opened the door and stepped onto the porch. “Everything okay?”

  “Um, well… no? You know that bed you mentioned? I’m afraid I might need it. There’s a ginormous tree down across the main road just past the driveway.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her white coat and shrugged. “I’m so sorry.”

  Noah stared at her for a few seconds, waiting for his brain to catch up with her words. When it did, a slow smile spread across his face then turned into a wicked grin. “Do tell.” He leaned against one of the support posts for the deck above. “How ginormous was this tree? That’s probably why the power’s out.”

  “Huge. You could make a small coffee table out of one of the slices. We should probably call someone. It’s completely blocking the road.”

  He wanted to tease her more, but she looked utterly miserable—and cold. “I’ll notify the sheriff’s department. They’ll know who to get on it. Come on in. I just put on another log, and it should be going quite cheerily by now.”

  As he made the call, he watched her go straight to the fire and hold out her hands. He was fascinated by the way the golden-hued light played across her lips, her cheekbones, the silky strands of her hair as he waited for the dispatcher to confirm someone was on the way.

  When he’d first met Sophie when he was seventeen, he thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. There was just something about her that called to him. And her appeal wasn’t just physical, though there was plenty of that. Even before the debacle with Erica, Sophie had devastated him, though in a good way.

  He very much suspected she still would if given half a chance. He didn’t know if he was more excited or scared by the thought.

  The call finished, he slid his phone back on his belt and crossed the room. “They’re on their way. The power company is too, from what the dispatcher said. It’ll take a while for them to clear the scene, I’d imagine.”

  She nodded. “I’m not exaggerating when I say the tree was huge. That’ll take some time to cut up into pieces small enough to move unless they can do it with a backhoe or something. I’m sorry about this.”

  “Don’t be. Now, since you’re officially an overnight guess at Hotel Noah, let me show you the options. This makes a fairly comfy bed,” he said, gesturing to the couch. “There’s the recliner. I don’t recommend it for any serious sleeping, however. We have Eli’s bed, which I happen to know has clean sheets. Flannel sheets even, so it would be good and warm if you leave the door open. You might have a bedmate though.”

  “Fig?” she asked, reaching out to the cat perched on the arm of the couch. She’d come back downstairs once she was sure there wasn’t any danger.

  “Her too.” At Sophie’s shocked look, he held out his hands, laughing. “I’m kidding! The other option is my bed. It’s also quite comfortable, and there are clean sheets there too. Today was laundry day,” he told her in a confiding tone.

  She shook her head. “You’re enjoying this.”

  He grinned. “Yeah. So? It’s like having a sleepover or something. Kind of.”

  “Do you have pajamas I can borrow?” she asked, biting her lip as she looked over her shoulder at the door to Eli’s bedroom.

  “I can scrounge something up, yes.”

  She sighed. “Where’s the warmest spot? Here on the couch?”

  He tilted his head. “Yeah, but the beds will be pretty cozy too. This stove does a great job at getting the whole house warm. My bed’s probably your second-best option. Heat rises and all that.”

  “Noah, I’m not running you out of your bed.”

  “You’re worried about getting cold.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Look, it’s going to be really cool tonight, down into the mid-twenties. I know we have this weird, complicated, uneasy relationship, but it’s ridiculous to let that interfere with you being comfortable and warm. Take my bed. It’s a king, it’s huge, and there’s room for both of us and Fig. She can chaperone.”

  She blew out a tense breath. “Okay. I don’t want you to think for an instant that I don’t trust you, at least as far as my personal safety goes.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, it’s just other areas I’m lacking in. I’m sorry,” he said, holding up a hand when she winced. “That wasn’t a hit at you. I swear it wasn’t. You have every right to feel the way you do.”

  This time, she was the one who laughed sadly. “Noah, I don’t even know how I feel about you anymore. Like you said a few weeks ago, everything’s shifted. I can’t keep up. I’m also more tired than I thought I was. I’m sorry.” She yawned, her eyes tearing up from the strength of it.

  “I’ll get you settled in then.” He grabbed one of the two lanterns and led her upstairs.

  Since his bedroom wasn’t huge, the lantern went a long way toward illuminating the space. He pulled open one of his dresser drawers and grabbed a soft T-shirt and pair of flannel pants, then he handed them to her.

  “Thank you.” She laid them on the bed and shed her coat, which she hung over the back of the armchair in the corner. “Which side do you usually take?”

  “The middle or wherever Fig doesn’t lay. She’s a bed hog, I warn you now. But wherever you want to try is fine.”

  Fig jumped on the bed and went straight to the middle then flopped down, and Noah gently pulled her tail. She rolled onto her back, paws in the air, and watched them.

  Sophie snickered. “Okay. I’ll work around the cat.”

  “Bathroom’s through here,” he told her, pointing at the door on the other side of the dresser. “There’s city water, so we should have some pressure, and the water heater should have a good tankful if you want to try a shower or whatever.”

  “I’ll just wash up a bit, save some for you.”

  He shrugged. “I can heat some up on the stove if I need to. Use what you need.” At a loss for what to do with himself, he scratched his temple. “I guess that’s it. I’ll head back downstairs. I might be a little bit before I come up, so don’t feel like you have to stay awake on my account. Let me know if you need anything?”

  She nodded. “Thanks again.”

  With nothing left to do except leave, he did just that.

  Once downstairs, he tried to come up with something to keep himself busy, but since the power was off and he didn’t want to make too much noise, that wasn’t an easy chore. Despite his best intentions, he couldn’t help but listen as she moved around upstairs. The thought of Sophie so close, in such intimate circumstances, was turning into a real threat to his equilibrium.

  Ordinarily, he’d have stayed up for a while, enjoying the silence the power outage had brought. But as soon as he heard the bedsprings squeak, he decided it was time to go up. With the second lantern in hand, he checked the doors then headed up the stairs.

  “Knock, knock,” he said when he reached the closed bedroom door.

  “Come on in,” she called softly.

  Heart pounding, he turned the doorknob and let himself in. Since she still had her lantern on, he turned his off. Sophie was sitting up in bed, Fig in her lap and being petted for all she was worth.

  “She’s so soft. And gentle. She’s not once offered to scratch me, even though she keeps pulling my hands down to rub against her face.” She demonstrated the
move.

  Noah smiled. “She’s a good cat. I’ll get changed in the bathroom.”

  “Okay.”

  He was so nervous he felt like a foolish young teenager again. And essentially all he was doing was providing her a safe, warm place to sleep. Despite the innocence of the situation, his emotions were screaming at him. He was getting ready to share a bed, regardless of the circumstances, with Sophie. Something he’d never in a million years imagined he’d be doing outside his dreams.

  Even though they were just loosely defined friends, his gut told him tonight would be a memory to hold on to. And as it might be the only one he’d get, he was determined to make every second of it count, even if that meant staying awake and listening to her sleep beside him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sophie tried to focus on petting Fig and not on the fact that any moment now, Noah would come out of the bathroom and get into bed. Because if she focused on Noah? She’d likely take off down the stairs like the big chicken she was.

  As Fig wasn’t passive about being petted, the job of keeping Sophie’s attention away from the bathroom door was easier than it might have been if she’d been alone.

  “What’s this patch on your side, pretty girl?” she asked as she smoothed the fur along Fig’s left side. It was an orange spot about the size of Sophie’s palm outlined in a thin rim of black fur. And it’s shape… Sophie laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Noah asked as he came out.

  “She has a fig on her side!”

  He grinned. “Yeah. That’s how she got her name.”

  “I mean, it really looks like a fig. That’s so neat. How’d you get her?”

  “I was working on a job up in Letcher County, and one of the other contractors found her. She’d crawled up under the hood of his truck to stay warm. He heard her meowing. I’d been thinking about getting a cat for a while, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. So I took her.”

  Sophie cuddled Fig. “It’s a miracle he heard her.”

  “No kidding.” He walked over to the chest-high bookcases that made up the wall that separated the loft from the rest of the house, and he pushed back the sliding screens to open the space. “This will help with the heat. Want anything to drink? I’m going to head down for some water.”

  She nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”

  He grabbed the second lantern and left, Fig on his heels. While he was gone, she got up and perused the shelves. Between the books downstairs and the books up here, Noah had to have at least fifteen hundred titles covering just about every subject imaginable.

  “You still love to read, I guess,” she said when he came back in.

  “In this family? It’s practically a requirement. Did Eli tell you that Haley’s a fan of Pip’s writing?”

  Pip was his youngest aunt, Amelia, who wrote in several genres under the name Alex Collins.

  Sophie smiled. “Yeah. He hasn’t told her yet though. He’s going to spring it on her at Christmas, I guess, when he gives her the advance copy of her latest book.”

  Noah gently tapped the tip of her nose. “And you were going to stay here and eat TV dinners—do they even make those anymore? And you’d miss that. Tsk, tsk, Sophie.”

  She swatted his hand. “I agreed to go, didn’t I? You can stop rubbing it in.”

  Fig came back in and jumped on the top of the bookcases. She walked to the edge and crouched on her belly, peering into the dark living room below.

  “Doesn’t it terrify you when she does that?” Sophie asked.

  “The first few times? Yeah. But she has a ledge on the other side that steps down into a catwalk of sorts, so if she disappears, don’t freak out.” As he finished speaking, the cat did just that.

  Sophie pressed a hand to her chest and rose onto her tiptoes, trying to see the ledge. “Thanks for warning me. Wow.”

  He joined her, resting his arms on the top of the bookcase. “I had to build it. She did fall once when she was about nine months old. Scared the living crap out of me.”

  “Did she get hurt?”

  “No, but she was a lot more cautious about where she went after that.” He stretched, lifting his arms high. The move lifted the hem of his T-shirt, revealing just enough of his belly to make Sophie’s fingers itch.

  Out of a sense of self-preservation, she went back to the bed and crawled under the covers. She didn’t lie down but raised her knees to her chest and watched him walk around the room, touching things.

  “I was ready to fall asleep downstairs, but I’m wide awake now,” she said ruefully. “Why does that happen?”

  Noah flopped down beside her. “Because you can’t get enough of my scintillating conversation?”

  She gently shoved him as he laughed. “You’re not boring, damn the luck. Didn’t you get the message that you were supposed to be droll and paunchy and bald and ugly by now?” Appalled by her candidness, she took a drink.

  He laughed harder then leaned in and very, very gently shoved her in a move so careful it was almost a caress. “You didn’t. And since turnabout is fair play… you were supposed to be fat and slovenly and a hag when you came slinking back to town, tail between your legs. That’s how karma’s supposed to work.”

  But his grin belied his words, and Sophie was helpless against her laughter.

  “It does feel a bit like I slunk back,” she admitted, “even though I know I didn’t.”

  “No, you didn’t.” His voice was quiet, serious. “And no one should make you feel like you did.”

  She picked at the label on the bottle. “I ran into Harold and Renny last week at the grocery store.”

  He sat up a little, watching her intently. “How’d that go?”

  “Oh, about like you’d imagine. He acknowledged me, but she turned tail and ran. Then when she thought I wasn’t looking, she followed me through the store until I was ready to check out. Do you know, I ended up with things in my cart that I have no idea what to do with? I don’t eat them or use them, and I don’t have any memory of putting them in there, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of running.” She kept her gaze on the bottle. “Twenty pounds of dog food, a man’s button-down shirt… seriously, I got home and unpacked my bags, and I thought I was losing my mind.”

  “They still blame you for Erica’s death?”

  She scoffed. “Of course. And I have so much anger toward them it scares me. It took everything in me not to turn around and tell her how glad I am that Erica’s dead, and if she had any sense, she would be too because at least we have some peace now. What does that say about me as a person?”

  Noah was silent, and she glanced at him. She couldn’t read his face.

  “Maybe that you’re human? And that you have some common sense? Because as awful as it sounds, I think the world is a better place without her in it. She never did one bit of good, and she thrived on the grief she caused. I hope she’s rolling in her grave right now, and I don’t care if that makes me petty,” he said. “It’s how I feel.”

  Sophie didn’t have a single doubt he meant exactly what he said. “If she knew Eli was happy again? That you and I can spend time together without trying to kill each other? Oh, yeah, she’d be spitting mad. She wanted you, you know. That was what started it all.”

  Noah sat up, and this time, his expression was easy to read—pure, unadulterated shock. “She what?”

  Sophie nodded. “She wanted you. Always did. You were the ‘love of her life,’ and she never let Eli or me forget that. We ruined everything for her—that was the victim shtick she used to beat us down when she wasn’t trying to cozy up to one of us to get something. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t know that. She… no.” He shook his head, clearly appalled.

  “I’m sorry. But she did. I think that was a big part o
f what kept Eli distant from you for so long. He started to mature about two years into their marriage, and she didn’t like that. Things got really rocky after that. About a year later, he found out about some of the affairs she’d had, and in the blowup, she told him that you two had been meeting in Myrtle Beach when he was deployed. Then when they were separated, without her influence, he started thinking clearly about forgiveness and mending fences. She saw that, and she ramped up her efforts to win him back.”

  Noah’s hands were clenched so tightly that even in the low light, she could see the whiteness of his knuckles.

  “After she died, he accused me of seeing her, but he didn’t go into detail. I knocked him on his ass and made him listen to me.” Noah cursed virulently. “Surely to God he didn’t believe… I knew she teased him but…”

  Sophie laid a hand on his arm, feeling the bunched muscles. “He saw the truth after she was gone.”

  He turned to her, hurt and anger in his face. “But you didn’t.”

  She stared at him, feeling her cheeks heat with a painful flush. “No. I guess I didn’t.” But she should have. As she sat in his bed, nothing but the raw truth between them, she couldn’t figure out why in the world she hadn’t. “You really never touched her, did you?”

  The question was rhetorical; she already knew the answer.

  Noah blew out a hard breath and faced the wall opposite the bed. “At this point, what does it even matter?”

  Sophie didn’t know what to say, what to do. She was shaken, and she didn’t know how to process her emotions.

  “It’s late—” he started.

  “All these years, I’ve blamed you for what happened. And none of it, at least most of it, was your fault any more than it was mine. I just never saw it.” She closed her eyes and sank back against the headboard. “If she were still alive, I’d kill her all over again. I swear I would.”