Unravel Me (11 page)

Didn’t he imply he was going to be around for a while? With the foul mood she’d been in lately, she could use a distraction, so maybe a flirtation—or more—wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Then she remembered. This particular temptation was here at
Juliet’s
house, a place she’d been looking forward to avoiding.

“Where is my evil stepmother anyway?”

Motorcycle man shrugged. “I told you I arrived early. Noah’s out, she’s out, I don’t know where either is.”

She guessed she should be grateful he hadn’t broken into the place.

“I’m Dean Long, by the way.” He stretched his hand toward her.

Without thinking, Marlys put her palm against his.

Electricity shot to her elbow as her bare flesh met his. Her gaze jumped upward to clash with his surprised silver eyes.

“Wow,” he said.

She yanked her hand away. “It’s the crisp October air.”

His smile dawned slowly. “Yeah, must be about seventy-five, seventy-eight degrees out here.”

Oh, what the hell. She found herself smiling back and enjoying the exhilarating feel of her blood zipping through her body. “Like I said, crisp.”

“Mmm-hmm. Snap, crackle, pop.” The flirtation in his eyes heated to seduction. “I don’t know your name.”

“Marlys.” She took a step back, and bumped into Blackie. He whined, and her fingers stroked the fur on the top of his head. “Marlys Weston.”

Dean watched her retreat a few feet more, Blackie pressed to her thigh. “Are you going to come back and see me again while I’m here, Marlys Weston?”

“I think I’m going to have to,” she heard herself murmur, then she turned like a coward and hightailed it to her car.

Once there, though, she realized she’d only been telling the truth. She still had Juliet’s package.

 

Noah ran across Juliet at Zuma, the two-mile stretch of sand situated at Malibu’s northern end. It was the kind of beach that symbolized California. The hundred yards from parking lot to waves were strung with dozens of volleyball courts and along the horizontal stretch lifeguard towers squatted like giant toddlers hunkered over plastic pails.

Whether it was thanks to fate, or instinct, or just dumb luck, his eye had caught on her car in the near-empty lot as he cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway. Though he knew Dean was waiting for him at the house, Noah hadn’t hesitated to turn off PCH and into the parking lot at the next opportunity.

He braked his truck beside Juliet’s Mercedes and then trudged through the sand in the direction of her solitary figure. She didn’t move or shift her gaze from the horizon across the water, even as two bright yellow lifeguard vehicles trundled past with rescue surfboards strapped to their racks.

From twenty feet she turned her head and looked at him. The breeze off the ocean had dashed pink color against her cheeks and onto the tip of her elegant nose. It had made her mouth rosy, too.

The mouth he’d kissed.

The mouth of the woman who last night had confessed her longing for a man’s touch.

He stumbled on nothing, tripping over his own feet like a skid row wino. One of the lifeguard trucks slowed beside him. “You okay, pal?” the driver called out, lifting his Ray-Bans to scrutinize Noah’s face.

“Fine,” he said, waving with the hope the gesture would be enough. Sure, he was publicly intoxicated, but he didn’t feel like explaining that he was drunk on memories of those reddened lips and that beautiful woman in his arms.

Her hair had smelled sweet and the smooth strands had slid against his cheek like water. She’d looked up when he’d groaned her name and without thinking, without weighing, measuring, worrying, he’d taken her mouth and given back the kiss of a starving man.

He wanted that again. He wanted to be the one who assuaged her need—“craving”—for skin. Contact. Touch.

The lifeguard glanced over his shoulder and took in the focus of Noah’s attention. Juliet was facing the men now, her hands stuffed in her pants’ pockets, her jeans stuffed in a pair of knee-length sheepskin boots. A long-sleeved white T-shirt clung to her slender frame.

“Ah,” the lifeguard said, with a grin, as the truck started moving again. “Break a leg, buddy.”

But nobody was going to get hurt, Noah assured himself, as he continued toward Juliet. This was about helping, not hurting. With several inches still between them, he halted.

She spoke first. “What are you doing here?”

“I . . .” Well, hell. He hadn’t thought it through that far. He’d spotted her car and formed a plan that only went so far as finding her. Throwing her down in the sand and having sex in the surf like the famous scene in
From Here to Eternity
wasn’t suitable for someone like the high-class blonde now staring him down.

He shoved his hands in his pockets to disguise the way his cock had already warmed up to the idea and tried shrugging away his uneasiness. He liked women. Women liked him. Before now, he would have claimed to know all the steps to the dance and how to easily flow from one to the other until two bodies went from the first moves of foreplay to the last throes of a satisfying fuck.

But this was Juliet. And from that night he’d rushed naked into her kitchen, nothing between them had been easy.

“Noah?”

Since he didn’t have an answer, he asked his own questions. “Are you all right? What are you doing out here?”

She swung back to gaze at the ocean. Her profile was so damn classically pure it made his still-stiff cock ache. The banner the breeze made of her caramel hair had his palm itching to fist his hand in the stuff and draw her close enough to once again heat those reddened lips.

“I need to take care of Wayne’s ashes,” Juliet said. “And here might be the right place for them.”

Cold dashed over Noah’s libido like a winter wave. Oh, Christ, he thought, wanting to kick his own ass to hell and back. Here he’d been certain she was considering her next move to satisfy her skin craving when instead she was contemplating what to do with her dead husband’s remains.

“Insensitive jerk,” he muttered, cursing that sexual thug inside himself.

Juliet frowned at him. “Noah? Are
you
all right?”

“Yeah. Fine.”
Just moving my brain back from my little head to the big one.
“So, about the general’s ashes . . . ?”

“Maybe this is their right resting place.”

As usual, she’d been pale but composed on the day he’d accompanied her to meet with the funeral director. Juliet had made all the arrangements according to her husband’s wishes. Marlys had been there, too, her gaze never lingering long on anything or anyone. The only time the general’s daughter had spoken was to request she be given some of her father’s ashes in a tear-shaped silver pendant—though Noah had never seen her with it since.

Maybe his thoughts of the younger woman transferred to Juliet. “I thought Marlys might have an opinion, but she says she doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

“You should decide for yourself.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Juliet turned to watch another wave wash in. “Here is pretty.”

“Here is pretty,” he agreed. “It’s quiet now, on a weekday autumn morning, but in the summer it will be crowded with people. Volleyball players, surfers, bodyboarders.”

“Kids,” Juliet said, her voice so quiet it was nearly drowned by the crescendo of the latest wave. “Children playing in the sand and dipping their toes in the water.”

Children. God, that was something that had died for her, too, hadn’t it? Noah had never considered that she and her husband might have wanted a family, but from that wounded expression on her face, it looked as if she believed there were no green-eyed, blue-eyed babies in her future.

For himself, he’d never given the next generation much thought, but it seemed like a damn shame to him now, no silky-haired towheads trailing like baby ducks after their lovely mama. Clearing his throat, he pressed the heel of his hand into his chest.

“In Iraq,” he started, driven to redirect the conversation with the first thing that came into his head, “there are soccer fields in the middle of the cemeteries. Families picnic there, too. It sounds weird, but I liked it. Those that had gone before were part of what was going on now.”

“Wayne would like that, too.” Juliet sank into the soft sand and drew up her knees to wrap her arms around them. “He’d want to be part of where people are living and laughing and enjoying nature. That works, I think.”

Noah joined her and they sat in a silence almost as companionable as they had once been. Before he’d kissed her.

A better man would regret that too-brief embrace. But a childhood when hunger gnawed at his belly more often than not had trained him to snatch the goodies whenever he could. A breeze kicked up and caught Juliet’s hair, its ends flying against his face.

He let them tickle his skin. He let them tickle his libido to life, too, as he imagined himself twisting his fingers in her hair and bringing that soft mouth toward his so he might kiss the sadness from her face. He’d kiss her, hold her, run his hands over all that smooth skin and those slender curves until she didn’t remember anything, anyone but him.

Everything but the two of them would be taken out to sea on the waves of what he wanted from her—what he had wanted for years but had made do instead with other kisses, other curves, other faces and skin. He’d wallowed in other perfumes to cover his desire for the only one that called to him.

She wanted touch and he wanted to touch. Couldn’t it be as simple as that? For as short as it lasted?

“Tell me about Iraq.”

The sound of her voice jerked him from his thoughts. “What?”

She held her hair back with her hand and gazed at him with that unbalancing combination of blue and green. “Death letters. Cemeteries. I feel bad. I’ve never asked you about your experiences as a soldier.”

“You were dealing with your husband’s situation,” Noah responded. “That was enough.”

“But not now. Not anymore.”

Now she needed more?

Contact. Touch. Skin.

“Juliet . . .”

“Tell me, Noah.”

He didn’t tell anyone. There hadn’t been anyone to tell. His mother never left forwarding addresses and his correspondence to the old man had started and ended with that stupid-ass missive he’d written but which never had to be mailed.

Except she didn’t look as if she was ready to let it go. So what the hell? “It was boring most of the time,” he said. “It was scary as shit some of the time. I was never so glad in my life as when we got on the bus that would take us out of Iraq to the airport in Kuwait. To be honest, I was scared as shit then, too, because there were a hundred stories around the sandbox of guys who bought it with leave orders in their pocket or who were blown up the day before they were due to depart the theater for good.”

So there it was. He hadn’t been any big war hero like the general. For four years—the last one a tour in Iraq—he’d been an everyday grunt with a job he’d signed on for without thinking much about what it entailed. An ordinary grunt who’d learned right quick that there wasn’t the whiff of a death wish in his body, despite the adrenaline that flooded him during dozens of night missions. Despite the many times they rode out on the Strykers with “Get some!” still hoarse in their throats and the beat of apocalyptic heavy metal music still ringing in their ears.

He thought of his buddy Dean’s reckless grin and the angry red shrapnel scars on his sergeant’s neck. He remembered Tim, “Tiny Tim,” the kid from Tacoma and his roommate at the FOB, whose scars now cut across his forehead and ran behind his skull and who couldn’t grin at all anymore.

Juliet’s eyes scanned his face. “You weren’t hurt?”

“No,” he murmured, his gaze on the Pacific, but his mind back at the hospital and the way Tim’s hands—the ones Noah’d seen grasping an iPod, a Gatorade, a girlie magazine—were now curled tightly toward his wrists like the seashells an uninjured, lucky SOB like Noah might come across on a beautiful California beach.

Juliet touched his arm, her fingers cold, her voice insistent. “You’re sure you weren’t hurt?”

“Of course not. I’m here, aren’t I?” He smiled down at her, at that perfect oval of her face, her caramel hair, her leaf-and-sky eyes. Nothing should touch that, he thought with sudden conviction, damning himself for telling her anything about war. He doubted the general ever had, and like him, Noah didn’t want anything unpleasant to touch her.

“Noah?” she questioned again.

But despite what he wanted, he felt his smile die and he heard himself start talking, as if she’d ripped off a scab with just his name on her lips, with just that sensation of her fingertips against his arm. He found himself telling her that while he was unhurt, that his friend Tim—his brother in arms—would never walk or talk or see again. He told her that an IED had taken away everything but Tim’s capacity to breathe, so he lay in a hospital bed, a husk of the man he’d been. Noah spilled about Walter Reed Hospital and the guys he’d seen in the hallways when he’d gone to visit Tim—men with prosthetic arms or prosthetic legs or men with prosthetic arms
and
legs.

Then, appalled at all that he’d revealed, appalled at the emotion he saw in her eyes, he jumped up. His feet stumbled over nothing again.

“I’ve got to go,” he muttered, already backing away from all the angst he’d laid at her feet. Christ! What was wrong with him? This wasn’t the kind of contact he’d wanted to make with Juliet. Not this kind of touch.

He hadn’t wanted this kind of closeness at all.

Seven

Love is friendship set on fire.

—JEREMY TAYLOR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was Knitters’ Night at Malibu & Ewe, and Juliet was dropping by the shop again, this time fully aware of what—who—she’d find inside. Her sisters.