The Wedding Pact Box Set - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,298

Isn’t that why you’re so cranky?”

“What?” Noah shook his head. “No, I’m not mad at you, Lib. It’s all on me. I’m sorry for being an ass.” He released a long breath. “I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

“Yeah.” She leaned back in the seat with a sigh. No matter how much she wanted to believe him, history had taught her that no man ever stuck around. But to be fair, she’d done her own share of bailing. “Let’s go.”

Noah took a long look at her before he pulled back onto the road. “We’ll paint one when we come back. Unless we go straight to Seattle from Las Vegas. You can help me pick out a new place and then we can fly back to K.C. to get Tortoise and pack your things.”

She wasn’t sure why his suggestion filled her with so much happiness, but the idea of moving to Seattle felt so right. Of course, it was also incredibly dangerous. Now that her lusty feelings for him had made an appearance, she wasn’t sure how well she could hold them back. Seeing Noah for several days every two or three weeks was manageable, but living with him every day . . . How was that going to work? Common sense told her that their relationship was like a carefully constructed house of cards. One wrong move and the entire thing could come crashing down. Was she really willing to risk it?

But the thought of not going filled her with disappointment. When she added it to her disappointment over the curse, her mother, her friends’ blindness to the true nature of her relationship with Mitch—not to mention their own ridiculous happiness, courtesy of the curse—and her inability to finish her photography project, she felt like she was drowning in it. At the moment, moving to Seattle felt like her only lifeline in her sea of loneliness.

It turned out there wasn’t much else to see along I-40. All the fun tourist sites were miles off the highway. Since they didn’t have time to stop, they decided to push through and try to make it to Hoover Dam before sunset. The drive through New Mexico was long and eventless. Noah was still subdued, though he clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and Libby didn’t feel much better. But they’d had so much fun the day before Libby decided to push her negative feelings aside and try to regain some of their lost joy. She made him play several rounds of the Alphabet Game, which instigated a good-natured five-minute argument about the rules.

“Using license plates is cheating,” she insisted.

“Libby.” He spread out his hand and waved it in an arc. “We’re in the middle of the desert. We have to use license plates or this game will last until we reach Las Vegas.”

Next they resorted to keeping track of states on license plates. After Noah found Alaska, he grinned. “This reminds me of the trips my family took when I was a kid.”

Somehow, despite all the time they’d spent together, they’d never delved much into each other’s pasts. She wasn’t proud of her relationship history and she presumed Noah felt the same way about his own. But it felt strange they’d never shared much about their childhoods. “Tell me a story from when you were a kid.”

His eyes lost some of their sparkle. “You mean growing up as Josh McMillan’s big brother.”

The pain in his voice made her suck in her breath. “Noah . . .”

“What?” He glanced at her. “It’s true. He was four years younger than me, but it didn’t take long for me to fall into his shadow. He was like the most perfect child ever born.” He shot her a grin. “But I’d made it easy for him. It couldn’t be too hard to look good in comparison to me.”

“We don’t have to talk about it.” She should have known by now that there was a reason neither one of them had volunteered information about the past, their childhoods included. Libby’s past was full of regrets and betrayals. Why would she want to dredge it all up again? Obviously Noah felt the same way.

He was silent for so long she assumed that was his answer. Then he swallowed, as though he were preparing himself. “No.” He turned to look her in the eye. “I think you should know. I don’t want to keep anything from you, but I need to work up the courage to tell you some of it.