Unravel Me (26 page)

Oh, shit. Was that it? Those secrets he’d buried deep? But he was sure he’d come to terms with them a year ago.

“There
is
something,” she said. Her doubt gave the still-cold air in the car a sharper edge.

Great. Dumbass. Why wasn’t he counting his blessings instead of telegraphing his vague concerns? Now he’d have to dredge up some explanation . . . Well, there was something he’d been meaning to come clean about since that day she’d accused him of giving her a pity fuck.

He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a reassuring kiss against her fingers. “I should have told you right away. The other day in your office . . . that was all Jean Lindstrom’s fault.”

“In my office . . .” Her voice sounded puzzled. “Wait—we’re blaming the rug burns gracing my backside on someone named Jean Lindstrom?”

Squeezing her fingers, he laughed. “Not that part. The other part, when I suggested you might not want Dean to know . . .”

“You know I’m not embarrassed about being with you.”

Noah kissed her fingers again. “I get that now. But Jean Lindstrom put a little chip on my shoulder—or more precisely, her father did. He was our high school principal.”

“Uh-oh.” Amusement filled her voice. “Let me guess. Your bad-boy self scared her daddy?”

“Got it in one.” Noah smiled a little, feeling sorry for the street-smart, yet social dunce he’d been—a teenager full of wounded pride and rebellious bluster. “When I showed up at the winter dance with her on my arm, her father refused to let me in the gym.”

“So you took Jean to the movies instead?”

“Ah, but then there’d be no chip on my shoulder, would there? She didn’t protest Daddy’s edict.”

Juliet was silent a moment. “She went into the dance without you.”

“Yep. Apparently Daddy’s reaction opened her eyes. Now, instead of considering me good-for-rebelling, I was good-for-nothing. She took the ticket I bought for her and waltzed inside, never looking back.”

“Little bitch.”

It still surprised and amused him to hear Juliet Weston use anything less than high tea vocabulary. He laughed.

“I hope she dreams of you at night.”

Laughing again, Noah shook his head. “Doubt it. She got knocked up by the president of the senior class and was married with a kid on the way before the ink was dry on her graduation diploma.”

“Hmmph.” Juliet flounced against her seat. “Then you’re lucky. It could be you that was married to Mean Jean and the father of her babies.”

“I never took that kind of risk with anyone.” Not with Juliet, either. They’d used a condom every time. He was disease-free, and no doubt she was as well, but he’d never wanted to make a woman pregnant.

Except . . .

Except, God, it jumped into his head. The image of a child. A towhead with Juliet’s uncommon eyes and his tall frame. Then another joined the first.
Two?
The second was a chubby, dark-haired toddler who could wrap a man around her little finger with just a flash of flirty lashes.

Juliet’s voice popped the mental picture. “You’re going quiet again. Are you feeling sick?”

“No.” Crazy, maybe. Deluded.

“Good.” She leaned closer and nuzzled his neck, then licked the edge of his jaw. “Mmm. Like sandpaper.”

He rubbed the scratchiness with his palm. “I’ll shave before—”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Uh-oh. Her voice took on this telltale throatiness every time she was thinking about steamy sex. He grinned, his lingering foreboding pushed off by the idea of ladylike Juliet with naughty plans of her own. “Why shouldn’t I shave?”

Her voice lowered. “Because I like to feel your whiskers here”—she lifted their joined hands to draw them down her neck—“and
here
.” His fingertips caught on the unmistakable jut of a hard nipple.

“Wait a minute.” His grin widened as through her layers of shirt and bra he tweaked that sweet little berry already waiting to be tasted. “Ma’am, what’s this?”

“Something we’ll save for later, soldier boy.”

“Later? But—”

“We’re here,” she said, a little breathless and a little smug sounding, and he realized they’d indeed arrived at Malibu & Ewe. He also realized Juliet had effectively defused his odd mood with thoughts of her creamy skin reddened by the rough caress of his five-o’clock shadow and the sensual promise of her already peaked breasts. Fact was, uneasy didn’t stand a chance in hell against lust.

“How long did you say this knitting thing goes on?”

She pointedly put his hand back on his leg. Left it solo. “A couple of hours. But you’re welcome to join us.”

God, he was thinking about it. Even just watching her was preferable to his own horny company. “Well . . .”

“Nikki brings cookies.”

That clinched it. The object of his desire, plus baked goods. A winning combination.

Or so he thought, until he walked in with Juliet and was the focus of twenty pairs of female eyes. Christ. But he’d been a soldier and trained to discern friends from enemies. Those bags they all had at their feet couldn’t be big enough for grenade launchers. Still, he grabbed some cookies on a napkin and beat a path to a lone chair in a half-hidden corner of the room. From there, he planned to entertain himself by tripping out on sugar and sexy plans for the elegant woman across the room who hid her naughty soul from everyone but him.

Yeah, that cool fog billowing around the edges of his brain didn’t stand a chance.

But he didn’t get the opportunity to amuse himself with scenarios involving Juliet and the fastest way to let loose her inner sensation seeker. Because an obstacle to that arrived in the form of Cassandra, who approached his hiding place and then worked some sort of spell on him, as if she was a third of Macbeth’s three weird sisters.

One minute he was swallowing a bite of cookie. The next he was holding knitting needles and a ball of yarn.

No. Really.

Noah looked at what she’d shoved in his hands and then up to her face. “What’s this?”

“Something you should try.” She smiled, that one so much like Juliet’s.

Still, he tried to resist. “You some sort of wool evangelist?”

“Knitting’s calming. You look like you could use calming.”

Anxiety was showing on his face? “I don’t know how—”

“I’ll show you.” She drew up a folding chair next to his. “Look. I’ve already cast on the stitches. All you need to learn is how to knit.”

Bemused, he looked down at the Army green stringy stuff. “What am I making?”

“That comes second. First you have to get a feel for it.”

“Cassandra—”

“The first knitters were men. Are you going to tell me that the hero depicted in
Braveheart
wasn’t manly?”

He frowned. “William Wallace was a knitter?”

“Between battles,” Cassandra said, without a blink. “Where do you think those kilts came from?”

“Wait just a minute . . .” But Noah let the objection die as his eye caught Juliet’s across the room. There was laughter in them, a sparkling, spontaneous happiness that he realized now she’d been without as long as he’d known her. Hell, he would shear a sheep himself to see that.

And knitting was easier than sheep-shearing . . . and easier than it looked. Clearly he wasn’t creating anything more useful than a lopsided, tight-here, loose-there sort of caterpillar, but the actual under-over-slide-the-stitch-off-with-the-point-of-the-needle wasn’t impossible, even for his big hands. He managed to finish his cookies while he fumbled with the yarn, and let his gaze wander on occasion to his lady, who occasionally abandoned her own yarn to work the register.

And laugh with the other knitters. Chatting, admiring their projects, rubbing elbows with other women in a comfortable way he wondered if she’d ever before experienced. In the last months of the general’s life, there’d been occasional visitors, but they’d been interested in the sick man, not the lonely woman who had assigned herself his bedside post 24/7.

Except when Noah convinced her otherwise.

Guilt tried to rise, but he pushed it toward the back of his mind where those clouds lingered, and instead reveled in gladness at Juliet’s obvious light heart.

“She’s bewitched you,” a male voice said.

Jerked from his thoughts, Noah nearly stabbed himself with one of the pencil-thick needles. It was Gabe, staring at him with an expression somewhere between queasy and astonished.

Noah glanced back at Juliet, then back at the man. “Uh . . .”

“Not her. I mean the Froot Loop. You must have let Cassandra whip out the eye of newt and wave her wand.”

“I heard that.” The yarn shop owner hurried over, her face a little pink and her quick breaths bringing her admittedly outstanding breasts into prominence.

Noah noticed that Gabe noticed, but the other man covered his interest so quickly that he didn’t think Cassandra had a clue.

She frowned at him. “Some people find their sexuality isn’t threatened by practicing a handcraft that’s been around for centuries.”

“Some people don’t avoid their sexuality by practicing handcrafts as well as celibacy,” Gabe retorted.

“Insults won’t stop me from asking where you’ve been.” Her voice lowered as she stepped closer. “Gabe, you’ve been out of touch for days. Did you go into your hole again?”

“If I did, it wasn’t deep enough to avoid noticing the way your piece-of-shit veggie car isn’t starting like it should. I’ll take a look at it tomorrow.”

“What do you know about cars that run on used vegetable oil?” she asked, hand on her hip.

“I know that it makes as much sense for a car to be fueled by what fried my onion rings as it does for a man to be fed by bran muffins instead of ones made from blueberries and cream cheese.”

The woman gasped. “Onion rings? Cream cheese muffins? Have you no thought to your cholesterol, your heart?”

“My heart, Cassandra, is my own damn business.”

The air crackled around the two as they continued their familiar food argument. Noah rolled his eyes and then sent Juliet a pointed look across the room.
Can we just get them a room or something?

Her mischievous smile messaged back.
Go ahead. You mention it and I’ll dive beneath the couch to escape the fallout.

He grinned—then felt the expression on his face die. Shit, that was strange. Of course he couldn’t really read her mind, but it was odd enough to even imagine he could. There’d been times in combat when he was certain he knew what Tim or Dean was thinking, but that was training kicking in . . . not—not—

“I thought it was just sex,” he murmured to himself. “A purely hormonal kind of thing.”

Next to him, someone snorted. “I could have told you it was much more than ‘just sex’ the first time I saw you with her.”

Noah’s head whipped around. Gabe. Last thing Noah remembered, Gabe had been engrossed in his tiff with the Malibu & Ewe owner, but now the other man stood alone, his gaze trained on Juliet and Cassandra who stood talking by the cash register.

Noah’s chest hurt. “I called it—”
Lust
. “And I wanted to protect her.”
I still want to protect her, hold her, support her, keep her safe.

Gabe offered no sympathy or solution, just turned his attention from the women to Noah. His expression was a mixture of pity and humor. “Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

Noah’s vague disquiet billowed and strengthened, then rolled in from the corners of his mind to fill his head, cold and damp and damn uncomfortable.

He knew the reason for it now, at least, but had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

What to do about being in love with Juliet.

Hell. Hell. He looked with longing toward the balcony and the dark night outside. Could a little cold air cure him?

 

Juliet closed out the register, her mood as high as the receipts from Knitters’ Night. Stretching her arms overhead, she eased the kinks out of her back and wondered how long such euphoria could last. Nothing remained forever, of course—and if she thought too hard she could feel guilty for such gladness—but though winter was coming on, her soul detected spring. She could feel herself unfurling toward a warm sun and growing roots in fertile soil.

Her sisters were the source of some of the feeling: They were the nourishing earth. As for the warm sun—she looked around for Noah, but he’d disappeared onto the deck outside with Gabe. So she called over to Cassandra, sprawled on one of the couches beside Nikki. “Great night.”

When the last customer had left the shop at the conclusion of the Knitters’ Night hours, her sister had kicked off her shoes. Now she had her feet propped on the low table in front of her. Inside her striped, handknit socks she wiggled her toes. “It’s the time of year. Everyone has a project to finish, needs a project to distract her from the craziness that’s coming with the season, or just wants a little personal downtime.”

Like Juliet had done a few minutes before, Cassandra lifted her arms over her head. “I’m exhausted.”

Nikki didn’t look up from the sweater she was knitting for Jay. “I don’t know why you should be. Juliet rang up all the customers.”

“Best eight bucks and change an hour I ever spent.” Cassandra said, her voice smug.

Nikki’s needles dropped and her eyebrows lowered as she frowned at the middle sister. “You cheapskate! Is that even minimum wage?”

Juliet laughed. “But I get a deep discount, too.” She dropped onto the couch opposite the others. “And I like having something to do.”

“You want something to do, you can come work for me. I said ‘yes’ to a couple of private catering jobs and now I’m swamped. Everyone wants to host a holiday party this year.”

Juliet’s high-flying mood dipped. That’s right. The holidays were coming. Last year, they’d come and gone without her even noticing, her grief so deep that not a whiff of turkey or a note of Christmas carol had penetrated.