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Nora shot him a look he knew too well.
“You will not.”
He grinned at her imperious tone. The fall hadn’t slowed her spirit at all.
“This is a temporary health setback. You’re not to make any permanent changes to my home.” She actually sniffed and tossed her nose in the air. “Especially not one so ugly as that.”
She frowned as Lydia walked in the room with a tray of food. “Andrew wants to hack up my staircase and add a lift.”
Lydia stopped in her tracks and stared at him as though Nora had just told her he tried to chop her head off while Lydia was off getting her a sandwich.
“You want to do what?”
He only laughed and raised his hands in surrender. It was hopeless. He’d already had to fight to get Nora to accept his money for the new staff.
“I’ve got plenty of my own damn money. I can pay for things myself,” she’d said.
Andrew knew that stubborn tone in her voice, but he also knew if Nora was the one to hire the extra staff, she’d eventually just let them all go when she thought she no longer needed them. If he hired the staff, he could decide how long they stayed.
Controlling? Yes.
But, Andrew wasn’t taking any more chances on Nora’s safety. Nora had capitulated only when Andrew told her he needed some way to alleviate his guilt. He laid it on thick, telling her she needed to let him do these things so he could live with himself after what he’d let happen to her.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she finally said, literally throwing her hands up in the air. “If you must.”
And they’d left it at that.
Now they’d all taken to eating dinner sitting on the couch in Nora’s temporary bedroom to keep Nora company.
As Lydia brought in peach cobbler for dessert, Nora piped up with news that jolted Andrew back into his teen years.
“Jillie Walsh just moved back in next door, Andrew. Do you remember Jill?”
Nora knew damn well that Andrew remembered Jill. When he was fifteen, he had the biggest crush of his life on the next-door neighbor’s granddaughter, Jill.
Andrew hadn’t been very good at hiding his crush when Jill was eighteen and he’d only been fifteen. She came to visit her grandparents many times. But the summer that Andrew was fifteen, she spent two months with them before she went off to college. Andrew spent most of the summer at his upstairs window watching her swim in the Walsh’s pool.
He didn’t know if Jill knew but Nora had definitely caught on to the reason for his sudden attachment to the upstairs window. Luckily for Jill, her bedroom was on the other side of the house or Andrew would likely have watched a lot more than Jill in her bathing suit by the pool.
“Really? I didn’t think the Walshes lived next door anymore,” Andrew said.
Andrew’s years in the corporate world had at least honed his skill at hiding his feelings so he was able to act a lot more casually about Jill this time around. But he wasn’t feeling nonchalant on the inside, which was pretty ridiculous given how many years had passed.
The mention of Jill’s name began a slow burn in Andrew’s body. He thought back to her long blond hair and captivating hazel eyes. Andrew hadn’t seen eyes like that on another woman in all these years. And no woman he had been with lived up to his fantasies about Jill. Not even Blair, the woman he’d once loved.
He wondered briefly if even Jill herself could live up to his fantasies, but he had a disturbing feeling an older, more mature Jill would live up to them and then some.
“They moved to South Carolina to live near their son two years ago but they kept the house. It’s been empty until now, but Jillie was divorced in September and she wanted to relocate. She’s moved into their house while she figures out what she wants to do.”
It didn’t surprise Andrew that Nora already had the whole story behind Jill’s reappearance. He was always amazed at how quickly Nora and Lydia had the scoop on everyone in the neighborhood.
“Wow,” said Andrew, “I didn’t even know she was married. Where has she been all these years?”
“She and her husband lived in Hartford. Mrs. Berlinger down the street spoke to her the other day but Jill didn’t tell her much about the divorce. No kids, so it was a clean break,” Nora said.
“Jill’s a photographer. Nature pictures, I think.” Lydia added that tidbit to the story as she cleared the peach cobbler dishes.
“Mrs. Berlinger said Jillie will be staying in her grandparents’ house until she figures out where she wants to buy something of her own,” Nora said. “You should go over and say hello tomorrow. I’m sure she’d be happy to see a friendly face now that she’s back.”
