Oh, shit. He really wasn’t an I told you so kind of guy, and that only made me like him more. Made me want him more.
The energy between us shifted, pulling taut, as though we were connected by more than just this rope. There was something here, and it didn’t matter how hard I fought it or how frequently we bashed heads about the book—it only grew.
His gaze heated and his grip tightened.
There were only inches between our lips—
“Are you guys done?” a small voice asked.
Blinking, I looked down at a girl who couldn’t have been older than seven.
“I was hoping to do this one next, if that’s okay?” she asked with hopeful eyes.
“Right, of course,” I replied.
Noah set me down and unhooked my harness from the rope line with quick, efficient moves. God, could his arms be any hotter? The muscles of his biceps strained against the short sleeves of his athletic shirt. Good thing it stretched, or he probably would’ve busted through.
“Thank you,” I said again as he unhooked from the line.
“That was all you. All I did was keep you safe.” The low timbre of his voice warmed my entire body.
“On belay,” another voice said. An older girl, probably in high school, had taken Noah’s place, and the younger one had already tethered herself to the rope. “Climb on.”
“Climbing,” the little girl answered, and then scurried up the wall like she’d been bitten by a radioactive spider.
“You have to be kidding me,” I muttered, watching the girl take only minutes to do what had taken me a half hour.
Noah huffed a soft laugh. “A few more times and you’ll be just as good as she is,” he assured me.
I shot him a look of pure skepticism.
“You didn’t fall once on the way up,” he remarked, reaching for my face slowly, giving me a chance to shy away. I didn’t. “That’s pretty amazing.” He took a slightly sweaty lock of my hair that had escaped my ponytail and tucked it behind my ear.
“I’ve never had a problem reaching for things I want,” I replied softly. “It’s the falling that gets me into trouble.”
And that’s exactly what this was, I realized. It was one thing to joke with Hazel about a post-divorce rebound, but quite another to like more than just his body, even though it really was incredible. It would be all too easy to fall for Noah Morelli.
“I caught you.” There was no smirky smile or flirtatious wiggle of his eyebrows, but that didn’t matter. The truth was intoxicating enough.
He had caught me.
“You did,” I answered softly.
“Want to do another one?” he asked, the corners of his mouth quirking up.
I laughed. “I don’t think my arms would let me even if I wanted to. They feel like spaghetti noodles.” I held them out as examples, as if he could see the exhaustion in my muscles.
“I’ll rub them down later,” he promised, and this time that sexy little smile of his reappeared.
My breath caught, imagining his hands on my skin.
“Want to learn how to belay?” he asked, halting my flash of fantasy.
“Spaghetti noodle arms, remember?”
“Don’t worry, the harness does all the work.”
“You trust me with your life?” I asked, peering up at him and doing my best not to stare at his long eyelashes or the curve of his lower lip.
“I trust you with my career, and that’s pretty much the same thing to me, so yes.” The intensity in his eyes was a clear challenge, and I felt it like a jolting shock to my heart, exceptionally painful yet life-affirming.
He really had risked it all for this book, hadn’t he? He’d left the city he loved and moved his life here to see it through.
In that moment, I knew two things about Noah Morelli.
The first was that his priority was and would always be his career. Anything else he loved would take a back seat.
The second was he and I operated on complete opposites of the trust spectrum. He gave it first, then waited for the outcome. I withheld it until it was earned. And he had more than earned mine.
It was time I started trusting myself, too.
“Lead on.”
Once he’d dropped me off at home, I pulled out my phone and called Dan. Within the hour, I’d put an offer in on Mr. Navarro’s shop.
I was all in.
Chapter Eighteen
May 1941
North Weald, England
It had been almost eight weeks and the light still hadn’t returned
to Constance’s eyes. Scarlett couldn’t push her, couldn’t advise her, couldn’t do anything but watch her sister grieve. And yet, she’d still asked her to transfer with her to North Weald. It was the most selfish thing she’d ever done, but she didn’t know how to simultaneously be a wife and a sister, so now both suffered.
Though she may have been on the outs with her parents since marrying Jameson against their wishes, they’d apparently kept the rift private, since Scarlett and Constance’s request to transfer to North Weald had been approved.
They’d been here for a month, and though Scarlett rented a house off-station for the nights Jameson could get a Sleeping Out pass, Constance had chosen to billet with the other WAAFs in the huts on the station.
For the first time in her life, there had been an entire week of Scarlett’s life where she’d lived completely, utterly alone. No parents. No sister. No WAAFs. No Jameson. He was over an hour away at Martlesham-Heath but came…home—if that’s what this was—whenever he could get a pass. Between her worry over Constance and her fear that something would happen to Jameson, she lived in a constant state of nausea.
“You really don’t need to do this,” Scarlett told her sister as they knelt on ground only recently thawed by spring. “It still might be a bit early.”
“If it dies, it dies.” Constance shrugged, then continued digging with the small trowel, readying the space for a small rosebush she’d taken from their parents’ garden while on leave that weekend. “It’s better to try, right? Who knows how long we’ll be at this station? Maybe Jameson gets reposted. Maybe we do. Maybe just I do. If I keep waiting for life to give me the most opportune circumstances to live it, I never will. So fine, if it freezes and dies, then at least we tried.”
“Can I help?” Scarlett asked.
“No, I’m just about done. You’ll have to remember to water it regularly, but not too much.” She finished tilling the soil at the edge of the patio. “The plant will tell you. Just watch the leaves and cover her up if it gets too cold at night.”