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“Beautifully, actually.” Noah pulled up a video he’d taken of the pair Wednesday evening and held his phone so he and Ethan could watch it together. “Look at how he struts for her. I think he’s smitten.”
Ethan sat ramrod straight, as if he were a puppet and someone had yanked his strings. “Saturday doesn’t work for me. It needs to be tonight.”
Just like that, their easy rapport collapsed like a building whose support beams had been targeted by TNT.
Noah kept his tone cordial. “It can’t be tonight. As I said, I have a prior commitment.”
“Is this a personal commitment or a business one?”
Noah pushed back in his chair. “If you would have checked the family calendar, you’d know. You and I have attended this event many times in the past.” As friends.
Ethan shifted in his chair, gaze falling to the ground. They’d spent many happy days at Isadora’s during their childhood, basking in her attention and getting into more trouble than two boys should have. Those had been good days. Did Ethan ever think about those days, too?
“Come tonight,” Noah urged. “Isadora may not have many years left, and I know she’d love to see you again.”
Ethan closed his eyes, and for a long moment, neither spoke, the past hovering over them like a ghost.
“I can’t,” Ethan finally said, sounding defeated, tired, and nearly broken.
What didone wear on a date with a god among men?
Emma stood naked in her closet and contemplated her outfit choices. She probably should have bought something new to wear, but who’d had the time? Noah—dear God, she’d have to adjust to calling him Noah—hadn’t exactly given her much lead time.
She should have flat out told him no—she one hundred percent should have told him no—and she still wasn’t sure why she hadn’t. Romantic entanglements were an enigma. They required a trust and openness she’d never been able to conjure. The physical scars from a lifetime of abuse healed, but the emotional ones weren’t so easily mended.
She’d come a long way over the years. She wasn’t the battered and broken fourteen-year-old girl who’d escaped her abusive environment, but despite all she’d accomplished, she’d never been able to connect to anyone romantically. She was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin about to go on a date with the sexiest man she’d seen in real life. No way this ended anything other than disastrously.
She should call and cancel, make up some excuse—any excuse. That was the smart thing to do, and dang it, she was a smart woman. And her smart brain kept circling back to one thing she absolutely couldn’t explain, and she didn’t like things that didn’t make sense. Noah could have any woman he wanted. For crying out loud, he’d had a bona fide supermodel on his arm and, presumably, in his bed. So why had he suddenly fixated on Emma?
Asqueakfrom the corner habitat drew her attention and made her smile. Sounded as if one of her tiny fur babies was on the move.
Emma stepped to the enclosure her brother had built nearly a decade ago and added on to over the years until it had become, what he’d called, a rodent high-rise. Shirley scurried up the stairs to Emma’s level, while lazy Laverne lounged in her zebra-print hammock. Neither sweet, snow-white rat seemed to harbor a single worry.
If someone had told her ten years ago how delightful and social rats were, she’d have run from them screaming. Okay, probably notrun, but she’d have given them some serious side-eye. But that was before her brother’s many deployments, when he’d asked her to take care of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while he was gone. While Dr. J and Mr. H had long since passed on, her love for the critters remained.
“Hey, Shir-Shir,” Emma crooned, easing her pinky between the slats. “I wish I had time to play, but I’ll make it up to you tomorrow, okay?”
Shirley gave the tip of Emma’s pinky a tell-me-more nose tap.
“Well, for starters, I have some bananas on the counter that are too ripe for my tastes. So what do you say to an all-you-can-eat banana buffet?”
Both critters loved bananas, especially when paired with a bit of avocado, which Emma also had in the fridge. She also had some goat cheese and sliced red onions that needed to be eaten, so she’d make herself avocado toast for lunch tomorrow. Too bad she couldn’t figure out what to wear tonight as decisively.
When she’d worked with the woman who’d built this house, Emma had knownexactlywhat she’d wanted. Three bedrooms, a master, a guest, and an office. She’d wanted a bay window with a reading nook in the living room and another bay window near the kitchen table so that she could take in the sunrise as she ate breakfast. She’d wanted cool tones on the walls and hardwood floors throughout. She’d wanted bright-colored mosaic tiles around her bathtub, sink, and for the kitchen backsplashes. She’d had every detail laid out in her head, and now, here she was, unable to figure out what clothes to put on.
She could always call Andi for advice. Her best friend would help her in a heartbeat, but talking about dates and dating with Andi always made Emma sad. Andi, too, even if she tried to hide it. Love lives were one of the few topics they avoided. Easier and less painful that way for both.
She could always call Gwen, but given Gwen’s fashion sense, Emma would likely end up looking like a Picasso painting someone had bred with a radioactive box of crayons.
Like it or not, Emma was on her own tonight—unless she called Noah and canceled this madness.
Noah stoodon the sidewalk in front of Emma’s house and took stock of his surroundings. The quiet, upscale suburb southwest of Houston exuded a rustic charm, especially Emma’s place. She’d forgone typical brick, and instead, she’d chosen gray and white stone. Robin’s egg blue siding added pops of color that created the perfect backdrop for the beds of wildflowers that wrapped the structure.
Wildflowers.She always smelled of flowers. Was this why?
He could too easily picture her working in the beds and gathering the fragrant aromas on her skin. He could also too easily picture himself burying his nose in the crook of her neck, breathing her in, and taking a little nip…
And another.
