He’d been thinking about her all day. Now that he’d breached the wall between them, it was as if his mind and body had decided that all bets were off. For six months Noah had done everything he could to ignore the hum of attraction he felt for her. Not just because she was his employee, but because she was a single mom and more vulnerable than most. He might think of himself as a cold bastard, but even he had lines he didn’t cross. Still, that hum was there, and now it was more noticeable than ever.
Sweet? He wasn’t feeling sweet.
She laughed a little and folded her hands together, fingers twisting nervously. “Well, whether you think so or not, it was kind of you to not—”
“What?” he interrupted, reading her expression easily. “Fire you?” Noah stood up from behind his desk so that he could meet her gaze squarely. “Did you really expect that I would fire you over your daughter’s mistake?”
She blew out a breath that ruffled the short fringe of bangs on her forehead. “Yeah, I thought it was a possibility.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Some men might have.”
He couldn’t imagine who, but that wasn’t the point. “Not me.”
“Yes, I can see that now.” She smiled, her blue eyes shining. “Anyway, I do appreciate it. And you were so good to Kara, offering her a job to earn money….”
He brushed that aside, since he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the offer he’d made. Noah lived his life by a simple rule. Don’t get involved.
Yet today he’d not only shattered that rule, he was actually having a hard time regretting the action. How had Annie and her daughter reached inside him and pulled out feelings and emotions he’d thought long buried?
“I know what it’s like to be a kid and to want something so badly you’d do anything to have it—” Noah stopped suddenly, sharply aware that he’d said more than he’d planned to.
But thankfully Annie didn’t ask questions.
His past was just that. The past. He refused to spend time thinking about drifting from foster home to foster home, with nothing more than a paper bag containing secondhand clothing to call his own. He remembered clearly the constant worry and the gnawing desperation, the hunger to be…more.
Which was why he’d made a vow to get through school no matter what it took. To work hard. To invest his money. To never again be susceptible to anyone else’s whims. And now that he’d succeeded, he wasn’t interested in remembering what had compelled him to get there.
“You’re different from most people, then,” she said softly. “Most of us can’t remember what it was like to be a child. To know that sometimes impulses lead to bad decisions.”
Truer words were never spoken, he thought. Hadn’t his own impulse to help brought him to this very spot? He walked around the edge of his desk, drawn by the warmth in her eyes as much as by the scent of springtime that clung to her. She didn’t back up, simply stood there as he got nearer.
Now a new and very distracting impulse was taking hold of him, he told himself, dropping his gaze to the lush curve of her mouth. He wanted to kiss her. Taste her. And that would only compound the mistake he’d already made. He wasn’t interested in connections, and Annie Moore had strings wrapped all around her. So, yeah, he had an impulse, but unlike a kid, he had better control over it.
Although if she kept looking at him as she was now, he wasn’t entirely sure how much control he’d be able to hold on to.
CHAPTER THREE
“Everybody makes mistakes.” Eager to get past the urge to reach for her, he shifted the conversation away from him.
“That’s true.”
“Your daughter’s a good kid.”
Instantly her face brightened. “She really is.”
“How long has her father been gone?” Scowling, he cursed himself for the blunt question. He hadn’t actually meant to ask it aloud. It was just that he needed to know if she was still mourning her late husband.
Some of that brightness faded as she glanced back over her shoulder at the little girl rubbing her dust cloth across the desk with more enthusiasm than precision. Turning her gaze back to Noah, she said, “My husband died when Kara was a baby.”
Selfishly, he was glad to hear it. He didn’t want her still yearning for the man she’d lost. Not when she could be thinking about him.
That notion scuttled through his mind so fast, he hardly recognized it as his own. Where the hell was this coming from?
“It must have been tough on you. Both of you.” His voice was low, as was hers. He told himself that he was just being nice. That none of this meant anything. But even he was beginning to doubt it.
“Sometimes,” she admitted, then almost unconsciously squared her shoulders and stiffened her spine. “It’s not easy being a single parent.”
No, it couldn’t be, he thought, though he had no way of knowing. But he did know that as a kid, he’d envied the children with parents.
“And as evidenced today,” she added with a sheepish smile, “I’m not a perfect mother.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” he assured her quickly. “Besides, all a kid really needs is to be loved. Everything else sorts itself out.”
She tipped her head to one side. “Is that experience talking again?”
Okay, they were getting in far deeper than he’d intended. He hadn’t meant to steer the conversation back down this path. He’d simply been anxious to keep that wall between them from rebuilding itself. Which just went to show he wasn’t thinking clearly. Because the best thing for both of them would be if the wall sprang up fast, harder and stronger than it had been before.
But she was looking at him, her big blue eyes drawing him in deeper and deeper.
“No experience,” he told her, deliberately misunderstanding her. “No kids.”
“I didn’t mean—but you were so good with Kara, I just assumed…”
“You’ve known me six months,” he reminded her. “If I had a family, you would have seen them by now.”
“Why don’t you?” she whispered, then sucked in a gulp of air, shook her head and said, “Sorry. Sorry. Don’t know why I asked that. It’s none of my business.”
“Not a big secret,” he said with a shrug. “I spent the last ten years working, building my business. A wife and kids would have slowed me down.”
She blinked. “Well, that’s honest.”
“You’ll always get honest from me, Annie.” But his brand of honesty wasn’t the kind her type of woman wanted to hear. She wouldn’t be interested in a man who didn’t want to tie himself to a family. A home. And if he had any sense at all, he’d be pulling back from her right now.
“Um…”
Just do it, he told himself. Bust out of this conversation, rebuild that wall of formality and step away. His brain knew what to do, but his body was fighting him.
“I’m all finished, Mommy!”
A small voice shattered the growing tension between him and Annie and Noah knew he should be grateful for the respite. He was attracted to her, sure, but Annie Moore and her daughter had “complications” written all over them. Complications he didn’t want or need.
“That’s great, honey,” Annie said, turning to face her daughter as if she, too, were thankful for an excuse to tear her gaze from his. “Why don’t you get your backpack and we’ll head home.” She checked her watch. “The bus is due in half an hour.”
“I don’t like the bus,” Kara complained, scuffing one shoe against the floor. “It smells bad.”
“Bus?” Noah leaned one hip against his desk and folded his arms over his chest.
Annie sighed. “My car’s in the shop. Something about points and pistons…or something like that, anyway. It’ll be ready by next week. Meantime, the bus goes right by our house.”
“And smells bad,” Kara reminded everyone.
Why the idea of Annie and her daughter standing at a bus stop bothered him, Noah didn’t know. After all, Crescent Bay was a small town, and they’d no doubt be
safe enough. Still, imagining the two of them on a damned bench when he had a perfectly good car parked outside was just irritating.
“I’ll take you home.”
“No,” Annie said, immediately shaking her head. “That’s not necessary at all.”
“Yay!” Kara crowed, and swung her pink backpack over her shoulder.
Odd, but it bothered him that she was willing to turn down a ride with him in favor of a public bus. Hell, he ought to be thanking her. Instead, he said, “It’s just a ride, Annie.”
She looked undecided, but her daughter turned wide, pleading eyes up to her and said, “Please, Mommy? I don’t like the bus.”
Annie was wavering, Noah could tell. Clearly her daughter was her weak spot, and he liked that about her. A kid deserved to be her mother’s focus. Even if she might be uncomfortable asking for help, she was willing to bend for her daughter’s sake.
“I don’t know…”
“It’s not like you’re out of my way,” he said reasonably, silently wondering why he was trying so hard to convince her. “Crescent Bay is so small everything is close by.”
“Well…”
“That means yes!” Kara grinned up at him as if they were conspirators and had just pulled off a tricky mission. Noah found himself grinning back. Hard to resist a six-year-old heartbreaker with a gap-toothed smile.
Annie laughed shortly. “All right, then. We accept. And thank you. Again.”
He looked down at her. He didn’t want her gratitude. He wanted…something he shouldn’t from a woman so tied to home and family. “You’re going to have to stop thanking me.”
“You make that difficult.”
“Can we go now?” Kara wanted to know.
“Yeah. We can go. But first…” He pulled his wallet from his pocket, flipped through the bills inside and pulled out a five. “Here’s your salary, young lady.”
Kara took it with wide eyes, then shot her mother a victorious look. “Wow. Look, Mommy! I got paid just like you!”
“Yes, you did, baby. And you have a very understanding boss, it seems.”
Noah moved to the closet, grabbed his suit jacket and slipped it on. When he turned around to face her, he was caught up in the beauty of her smile as she looked at him. His chest felt suddenly tight and air had to force its way into his lungs. Six months was all he could think. Six months she’d been in his office and this was the first time he’d seen that smile of hers directed fully at him.
He wanted to see it again. Soon.
Then she spoke. “Honestly, Noah, as nice as this is, you don’t really have to do it.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I think I do.”
He took her elbow and a slow rush of warmth filled him. He steered her toward the door, pausing only long enough for her to scoop her purse off the edge of her desk.
Kara hurried out of the office in front of them, her quick, light footsteps tapping like a racing heartbeat. “It’s just a ride, Annie,” he said again.
But even he didn’t completely believe that.
OVER THE NEXT FEW days the atmosphere in the office seemed to shift somehow. Kara had always been there after school, of course, but before the incident with the shoes, Noah had more or less ignored the girl’s presence.
Now Kara was running in and out of his office with impunity, doing her “job.” And Noah didn’t seem to have a problem with it at all. Most men would have been irritated by Kara’s constant stream of chatter. Instead, Noah was infinitely patient with the girl. Annie was frankly amazed at how well her daughter and her boss were getting along. And to think she’d believed Noah Fielding to be a cold man.
She couldn’t have been more wrong. He treated Kara like a mini-adult. He listened when she told him stories about school and gave her his full attention when she talked about Gracie and the princess shoes Kara was planning to buy for her friend.
He’d even insisted that Kara call him Noah, saying that Annie’s direction to her daughter to call him “Mr. Fielding” was not necessary. And between the two of them, Annie had simply lost that minor battle.
Hard to argue with the growing relationship between her little girl and Noah, though. Kara was blooming under his interest. Annie hadn’t even realized how much Kara needed a male influence in her life. With her father gone and no family to speak of, there really hadn’t been a male role model for Kara. Now it seemed that Noah had stepped into the position seamlessly, and Annie felt a tenderness growing inside her for him.
If there was one sure way to a mother’s heart, it was for a man to take an interest in her child. But the moment that thought entered her mind, she frowned a bit. What if there was an ulterior motive to Noah’s kindness? What if he was being attentive to Kara to get closer to Annie?
No.
If that had been his plan, she told herself, he wouldn’t have waited six months to begin it. She glanced up from her desk to see Kara’s pale blond head bent next to Noah’s dark one over his desk. He was explaining subtraction in a patient voice and Kara was hanging on his every word.
Annie couldn’t quite quell a rush of wishful thinking. Up until recently she’d avoided categorizing her boss as an attractive single man. She’d trained herself to pay no attention at all to Noah’s immense sexual energy. After all, she was his employee. But the truth was, he fairly oozed sensuality when he walked into a room, and he had the ability to send a shiver along her spine with a glance.
All of which was just a little disconcerting to a woman who hadn’t had a man in her life in six years.
“That’s why,” she muttered, keeping her voice a husky whisper as she typed up one of Noah’s letters. “You’ve been too long on your own and now you’re starting to daydream. Do yourself a favor and cut it out.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Briefly she closed her eyes and muffled a groan as Noah walked up to her desk. Please God, he didn’t hear me.
“Oh, just talking to myself.”
“About anything interesting?”
When she looked up at him, something inside her turned over in a slow, easy roll. “No,” she lied, then looked past him for Kara. Her daughter was sitting in Noah’s chair at his desk, still doing homework. “If she’s bothering you…”
“Do I look like I’m bothered?”
“No,” she admitted, sliding her gaze back to him. “You look like you’re being nice.”
“And this worries you?” One corner of his mouth lifted into a half smile.
Oh, yes, it really did, Annie thought. Because the kinder he was to Kara, the warmer Annie felt toward him.
“Should it?”
He perched on the edge of her desk and looked down at her. “Depends,” he said, “on what exactly you’re worried over. Me spending time with Kara, or the time I’ve been spending with you?”
“Well, that gets right to the point of things, doesn’t it?” she asked quietly, so that her daughter couldn’t overhear.
“I told you that you would always get honesty from me, Annie.”
“You did,” she agreed, still meeting his gaze. She wished she could read his thoughts in his eyes, but she knew, from long experience with the man, that he guarded what he was thinking very carefully. He had a perfect poker face, in fact. Annie had seen him use that talent to his advantage in negotiations on more than one occasion. He was able to get exactly what he wanted from his business opponent without giving away any more than he planned to.
But it was a different matter altogether having those cool, carefully shuttered eyes focused on her.
Wants she’d denied, desires she hadn’t given thought to in years were suddenly racing through her mind, her body. So far, Annie hadn’t been able to squash them.
Maybe it was time to try.
“So, Noah, being honest, why are you being so nice to us?” She was holding her breath as she waited for his answer and vaguely wondered if he could tell.
“Fair question,” he said with a nod. “The honest answer is…
I don’t know.”
A short laugh shot from her throat. Not what she’d expected, but somehow his answer made her feel less…uncomfortable. “Okay, that’s honest.”
He smiled at her. “I could say that I like your daughter, but then you’d worry that I was cultivating her to get close to you.”
She flushed and he noticed.
“Already considered that, have you?”
“And dismissed it,” she admitted. “As long as we’re being honest, I did wonder. But if that was what you were up to, you would hardly have waited for months to try out your plan.”
“Unless I’m diabolical.”
Annie laughed again, as she was sure he’d meant her to.
“Look,” he said, standing up from the desk and shoving his hands into his slacks pockets, “I don’t have an ulterior motive in this. Kara was upset. It was easy enough to give her chores around here to help out.”
“And the rides home every night?”
He shook his head. “You’re really dissecting everything, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I am,” she said, giving her daughter another glance to make sure she was still in Noah’s office and out of earshot.
“There’s no ulterior motive,” he told her again, his eyes locking with hers as if he were willing her to believe him. “But if you want to pay me back, make me dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Do I make you nervous?”
“Yes.”
He grinned. “You don’t have any reason to be.”
“Yet somehow that changes nothing,” she told him. Swarms of butterflies took off in the pit of her stomach. Her mouth went dry and her palms were damp. Being the sole focus of a man like Noah was enough to make any woman feel a little…out of her depth.
Yet at the same time there was a small thrill of excitement, edginess that she hadn’t felt in far too long. And realizing that made her say honestly, “As flattered as I am, I’m not in a position to indulge myself in a flirtation with the boss, Noah.”
“Who said anything about a flirtation?”
She shook her head. “Whatever it is you’re hinting at, then. I have Kara to think about.”
More Than Words, Volume 6 Page 32