She shook her head. “Nah. I don’t kid about serial killers. At least not anymore.”
“Damn, Yasmin.” Noah shook his head, clearly at a loss. “I’m so sorry. I obviously don’t know all the specifics, but you know what they say about people like that. They’re masters at hiding what they really are. They’re monsters, and no normal person can be expected to understand the way they think.”
She glanced down at the grass, hugging the quilt tighter. “But I was close to him, Noah. He was my lover, my friend. He made me laugh. I laughed with a man like that and I just…”
She swallowed, fighting past the tightness in her throat. “I don’t know how to come back from it. And I don’t want to. I just want peace and quiet and a chance to love someone whose deepest, darkest secret is that they wet their diaper or spit up their pureed carrots.”
His warm, strong—but gentle, so gentle, if only all the hands in the world were hands like these—palm cupped her face. Clint’s hands had been gentle at times, too. But they had never made her feel this safe.
Safe like her tree house when she was in elementary school, her private hideaway from all the hard things, her place above and separate from the world where she could dream all of her most secret, special dreams.
She and Clint had talked about dreams. About how much Yasmin wanted a family and children. Clint had worried about their age difference—he was in his mid-forties, over a decade older—and whether or not he could support a family on a bartender’s salary. He’d never mentioned anything about fitting murdering innocent women into his fathering or work schedules.
Surely Noah had secrets, too. Things that weren’t on his sperm donor résumé or reflected in those beautiful brown eyes.
She looked up, meeting his gaze as she dared to ask a question she doubted he would answer. “What are your dark secrets? What would you try to keep me from learning if we were ever anything more than friends?”
His tongue swept out to dampen his lips, but it was a nervous gesture not a sexual one, and when he spoke again, his voice shook a little. “I have a few. And I’ll tell you all about them, even though a part of me is screaming that it’s a dumb call to take my skeletons out of the closet in front of a woman I’d love to stick around for a while. But I need to tell you something else first.”
“Okay.” She leaned into his hand, a little afraid of how good it felt to be touched by this man. “Shoot.”
“I’m so glad you’re okay.” The intensity in his voice made her shiver despite the sun warming her skin. “I’ve been standing here imagining a world where that son of a bitch added you to his list of victims and…” His breath rushed out. “I’m just glad you’re here, safe in Lonesome Point, trying to convince me to let you pay two thousand dollars for a sperm sample.”
“Well, not anymore,” she said, forcing levity into her voice. “Now, I’m expecting the friend discount. You’re not getting more than a grand out of me now, O’Sullivan.”
He smiled, and his thumb brushed gently across her bottom lip, making her entire body feel like it was catching fire. “I think we should leave those kinds of negotiations until later in the night. I told you I was easy, but I’m even easier after a few beers.”
“Is that right?” She arched a brow, refusing to speak the words on the tip of her tongue.
She wasn’t even going to joke about getting his sperm for free. That was dangerous ground, especially now that it seemed like he might actually be considering her request. She’d anticipated a firm no, but it looked like Noah was weakening.
Maybe it was her sad story or the friendship growing between them. Or maybe when he looked into her eyes, he felt the same thing she did when she looked in his. Maybe he could see that she was safe. Good. Someone who could be trusted to make a home filled with compassion, where a little boy or girl with his big hands and her smile could grow up loved and understood and free to work at the messy business of growing up with a mom who would do everything she could to ease their way.
Her lips curved even as her throat went tight again. She could almost see that little one, that sweet baby made from a little piece of Noah and a little piece of her, and she wanted to meet him or her more than ever.
“But can my dark secrets wait until after we’ve eaten?” Noah asked, breaking into her sentimental thoughts. “We’re almost to Bruce and Adrienne’s secret picnic spot and my stomach is going to start growling loud enough for you to hear it before long.”
“Yes.” She sniffed and pretended it was allergies not emotion making her eyes water. “Dark secrets can wait. I think dark secrets always go best with dessert, anyway.”
“Like dark chocolate,” Noah said, nodding seriously. “Makes sense.”
“A spoonful of sugar helps the dark secret go down,” she quipped, heart fluttering when he laughed and put an arm around her shoulders.
“Come on, there’s a trail behind these bushes,” he said. “If we find it fast, I can be popping the top on a beer for you in less than five minutes.”
“Sounds perfect.” She followed him around the shrubs and up a hidden dirt trail leading farther into the wilds surrounding town. She might not trust her own intuition, but she trusted Noah O’Sullivan. It didn’t make sense—if you combined every hour they’d spent together, it would barely make up the length of a Lord of the Rings movie—yet she couldn’t deny it.
After her recent history, she should be too scared to trust the voice deep in her bones insisting that this man was one in a million, the one she could trust more than every other man she’d dated combined. But Noah’s arm around her felt too damned good and that voice was coming from a place Clint had never touched, a secret, primal place that insisted that in a world full of frogs and much, much worse, she’d finally found herself a prince.
CHAPTER NINE
Noah
The picnic spot appeared around the next curve in the bend, a grassy place between two shade trees with a hammock big enough for two stretched between the trunks, but Noah only spared it a glance before his attention returned to the woman by his side. He couldn’t stop thinking about her last romantic relationship and the fact that it could have so easily been her last. If things had played out a little differently, he might never have met Yasmin North because a monster would have stolen her bright light away from the world.
The thought made his chest ache and his arms long to pull her in for a long, hard hug.
But they weren’t at that point in their relationship yet, and they might never be if he couldn’t find a way to convince her that he was worth putting her justifiably fearful heart back on the line. Because he wanted a chance at her heart, not just her stunning body or her clever mind.
Sometime during the walk up Jasper Hill, he’d stopped fighting the crazy certainty that they were meant to be something important to each other. He couldn’t fight himself and fight for her at the same time. Well, he supposed he could, but he didn’t believe in dividing his energies. Once he decided to go for something—whether it was a patent on new software or funding to supply his latest educational outreach effort—Noah threw his entire self into the battle, body and soul.