I jumped as someone appeared around the corner, seemingly from nowhere.
“Hey,” Noah said casually, as if the sight of a woman in his garden with a towel wrapped around her naked body wasn’t an issue at all. She was pretty, blonde and had very tanned and muscular legs. The woman registered me briefly, tipped her head and gave me a small hello and then walked towards the house. Who was she?
“Can I use your . . .” She didn’t even finish the sentence.
“Shower. Yeah,” Noah replied.
“Sorry. The guy is coming tomorrow to fix the tap,” the woman said, walking past me in her towel. I turned and looked at Noah with surprise.
“Oh, I forgot to mention, that’s Maxine, she rents the garden cottage.” He pointed towards the cage and I looked again. And that’s when I saw the little building behind it.
“Oh,” I said, and suddenly, without making the conscious decision to think about it, I wondered if she and Noah were an item. If they were, they made a really good-looking couple, especially because Noah was so good-looking. But I didn’t really have much to compare him with, so how would I know how good-looking he was? And then I started wondering if I was considered good-looking?
CHAPTER 15
“What kind of food do you like?” Noah asked as we climbed in his car. He drove a small, understated car, which was exactly the kind of car I would have pictured him driving. Noah was down to earth, there was nothing flashy and showy about him, other than those muscles, mind you.
“I’m not sure,” I confessed, and looked down at my feet.
“Oh, sorry, I don’t get many—any—visitors in my car. Well, this one, anyway. I’m usually driving a car with flashing lights, and those people don’t really care what the car looks like.” He reached down, looking somewhat embarrassed—or so the slight pink sheen in his cheeks led me to believe—and grabbed an empty water bottle, a gym bag and two cereal-bar wrappers and tossed them onto the back seat. “I have to eat breakfast on the run a lot,” he said, crunching the wrappers up, looking more self-conscious about those than the dirty socks I could see sticking out of the gym bag.
“What about Mexican food?” He started the car and reversed carefully out of the narrow garage.
“Honestly, I have no clue,” I said, nervously watching his side mirrors, which came dangerously close to the postbox. I felt very uneasy again, much like I had in the taxi last night, and I didn’t know why.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting that you probably don’t know that kind of thing.” He apologized in that voice he’d apologized with this morning. I wasn’t so sure I liked that voice. It made me feel like he thought of me as a weak, fragile bird that couldn’t fly. Mind you . . . was I? I was completely helpless in so many ways. Relying on him for a roof over my head and food in my stomach. Maybe I was fragile after all. I didn’t like that thought, and I wished I had some concrete evidence, like a memory, to prove otherwise.
“It’s okay. This is a strange situation.” I tried to make him, and me, feel a little better about it all.
“Yes, it is,” he said quietly.
“I’d like to try Mexican food, though. Maybe, if I eat it, it’ll jog a memory. Or if not, I’ll discover something else about myself.” I gripped the side of the seat as he pulled into the traffic. Sitting in this car didn’t make me feel very safe. I needed to open a window, as fast as possible.
“Can I . . .” I didn’t even finish that sentence, as I pressed the button and watched the window come down, much to my relief. A taxi cut us off in the traffic and Noah was forced to hit the brakes, hard enough that the car jerked a little. I gasped and straightened in my seat, my heart pounding in my chest, as if it had woken up from a deep sleep.
“You okay?” Noah glanced at me.
“Uh . . . I think so. No. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think I like being in cars.” I stuck my face closer to the open window and gulped in the cool air. “Or confined spaces. I don’t think I like those either,” I added, my finger resting on the window button in case I needed to