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Noah was looking down at her hand on his as if her hand was the actual torture device, and was maybe a fire poker. Raemy had just enough boldness to keep it where it was. Maybe because she could see that muscle in his jaw flex once again.

He cleared his throat. “Then I don’t understand what we’re doing.”

“How about this.” She eyed him. “Why don’t you tell me about you?”

“Me? Why?”

She laughed as she sat back, relinquishing his hand in the process. And she was sure she wasn’t imagining the way he curled it into a fist, then flexed it as he pulled it back and set it in his lap. As if he could still feel the place where they touched, same as she could.

“I want to know about you,” she said. “I told you before. William idolized you.”

“He was a good kid and a good Marine,” Noah said sternly. “He was⁠—”

“Why did you join the Marines?” Raemy asked, cutting him off before he could issue more proclamations about William. Proclamations that she doubted would differ much from the speech he’d given at the funeral.

Noah sat back in his seat and folded his arms, and looked very much as if she was threatening him again. And he was sitting there, stoically allowing this torture.

It should have been annoying, but all it did was somehow make him hotter. At least that was annoying, she thought.

“What kind of question is that?” he asked, in that quietly outraged tone that he did so well.

“It’s the kind of question that people ask one another when they want to know more about each other’s lives,” Raemy replied, in that particularly bright voice she used for misbehaving eight-year-olds. “It’s fun! If you wanted to try, you could ask me things. Like, what do you do for a living, Raemy? And I could say, well, Noah, I’ve been teaching elementary school for a long while. Almost ten years. Mostly third grade. And, yes, I love it, but I am also happy to be on a bit of a break from it.” She smiled at him, wide and guileless. “See? So easy. Now you know more about me than you did before.”

While she was talking to him, she got the great joy of watching him react to the way she was talking to him. The clearly patronizing—she liked to call it helpful—tone she was using that she doubted anyone used on him even when he was eight himself.

Noah looked...thunderstruck. Then something like astonished. She saw a flash of heat, though whether it was temper or something else, she couldn’t have said. Her body had its own ideas on that.

And now that she was finished, he was still sitting there with his arms crossed, regarding her as if she was some kind of potentially dangerous magical creature sitting there across from him. Something that disobeyed all laws of nature and man.

“Did you just speak to me like I was in your third-grade class?” he asked, incredulously. “Because that’s what it sounded like.”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, Staff Sergeant,” she replied, and he couldn’t possibly see that her pulse was beating a little too fast, so she hoped he thought that she was as relaxed and unbothered as she was trying to look.

She reached forward and picked up one of the warm, yeasty-smelling rolls and cracked it open, then lavished it with butter. She didn’t look up again until she’d taken a big bite, and was pleased to see that he was still staring. Though now that particular gleam he had in his gaze made her whole body seem to break out into some kind of exultant shiver.

Or maybe that was the butter. She did love her butter. A genetic necessity for a Midwesterner.

“My grandfather was in the Marines,” Noah said, darkly. As if it was some kind of secret, and Raemy had dragged it out of him, and he was only going along with it to be polite. “He always said that if he’d wanted to sort my father out, he would have sent him off to the Marines too, but my dad wasn’t like that.” He made a small sound that was a laugh. A rusty sort of laugh, but a laugh. “Still isn’t.”

“This is the grandfather who left you the diner and the house?” Raemy tried to keep her voice as casual as the rest of her, so she wouldn’t scare him off. So he would keep telling her…anything, really. She would be happy to hear anything at all.

It was probably best not to look too closely at that sentiment.

To her surprise—and delight—Noah kept going. “His name was Seamus. It might surprise you to hear that he was very Irish. He was deeply fond of his only son, but could not relate to him. I guess that’s a family tradition, because my father certainly couldn’t relate to me. Not sure he can now, either. He’s a quiet man. He likes quiet things.”

“Because you’re often mistaken for a one-man marching band?”

Noah ignored that, though his dark eyes gleamed. “He’s a professor at U-Dub. He teaches poetry. He likes to read a lot, and it’s not that I don’t like to read, but I was always very athletic. They sent me down here every summer because it was clear to everyone involved that I was basically a chip off my grandfather’s block. My parents used to laugh about it.” He looked down at his plate, and she thought there was a hint of a smile there. “They probably still do. It’s just that Granddad isn’t around anymore to make it worse by attempting to understand my father’s various works on Elizabethan poems.”

“Your parents are still alive?”

Noah nodded. “Alive and well. They come down here in the summer, usually, because they’re born and bred Pacific Northwesterners and they don’t like it when it gets too sunny up there. My mother has been a dental hygienist for the same dentist, who’s my godfather, for as long as I can remember. They have a very happy life.”

Raemy leaned forward. “So did the Marines make you this moody? Or did you come out this way?”

Something that she was convinced must be laughter gleamed brightly, then. “I grew up in Seattle, Raemy. It’s dark and moody and besides, I’ve always had a certain reserve.”

Raemy found herself thinking of classic grunge music. Flannel shirts. She found herself wondering if he had tattoos. If so, of what?