didn’t know that it’s not on the prohibited-buildings list for short-term rentals.”
Okay, that was at least two points to him, if she wanted to update Marian on the score later. He was right; that was the worst of it. He was completely right.
But still. Still, twenty years! She had to remember that she knew lots of things he didn’t.
And she intended to use them.
“I know you said you didn’t know your uncle well,” she said, and almost immediately the look in his eyes changed—all that confidence gone with a blink, replaced at first with something cautious and vulnerable, and then, when she finished her sentence, something determined and hard.
“But I did. And he wouldn’t have wanted this. He really loved that apartment.”
He stared at her. Nothing like the starlit gaze from the other morning.
Nothing like that at all.
“I’ve heard,” he said flatly.
“It’s only that,” she said, not really minding the note of pleading in her voice, “we’re a family.”
For a second, she thought it might’ve worked. He dropped his eyes to the grass and shifted his feet. She thought he might’ve even nodded his head.
But if he did, it wasn’t in agreement.
“Well, Nora,” he said (she did! not! like it!), raising his glasses-free, sympathy-free eyes to hers. “I’m not really a member of your family. So.”
So?
That so—it sounded to Nora like a declaration. Whatever soft conversation they’d started with on their balconies, there was no going back to that. They were on different sides now.
Around them, the backyard seemed unusually still, unusually quiet, and she had the sense that they were being watched—that everyone had gone back to their apartments, pressing their curious, concerned faces against their back doors to see how Nora would handle this.
So, she thought, making it a declaration of her own. She would not break first. She would stand here where it felt like the air got thinner and thinner between them, where it felt like her body buzzed with strange, stifling confusion: a cocktail of anger and attraction, disappointment and excitement.
She would not break first.
When his phone beeped again, she held herself still. But when he moved to pull it from his pocket, looking at the screen, she let herself breathe a sigh of relief. A win by default was still a win.
“I need to go,” he said, but she could tell it cost him, to be the one who had to walk away.
Good, she thought, relishing the thought that her neighbors would see him retreat. When he turned from her and started making his way toward the back fence, she felt a surge of reckless, unearned confidence.
“I won’t make it easy for you!” she called toward him.
He stilled in place. When he turned around, he seemed to look past her, toward the building, toward its balconies. She wondered if he could see her neighbors there, watching them both. That smile—no, smirk—played again on his mouth, and she thought (she couldn’t believe she thought!) that she’d like to kiss that expression right off his face.
“It’s a good thing, then,” he called back, his voice carrying across the yard. “It’s a good thing I’m not used to easy.”
Chapter 4
It was easier, frankly, to think of her as an enemy.
Will had a lot of experience with enemies. Not people, not exactly, though he guessed if he thought about it hard enough, the man in whose apartment he was standing would probably qualify. No, Will’s enemies had always been bigger, more . . . institutional. School systems, government programs, billing departments, that sort of thing. Becoming a doctor meant that he’d managed to keep these deep-seated blood feuds from his adolescence alive into his adulthood, though he supposed he had a more experienced perspective now. Still, when he’d been younger, full of fear and sadness and anger, having adversaries had helped him focus, helped him survive. Nothing was complicated when you had an enemy. It was you versus them, and you versus them stopped you thinking about the other problem, which was usually something more like: you versus you.
You versus your fear. You versus your sadness. You versus your anger.
So with Nora—the girl on the balcony after all, it seemed—it would have to be him versus her, and not him versus his memory of her. Not him versus his attraction to her. Not him versus his boyish, reckless feelings for her.
In the two days since he’d walked away from her, he’d worked on it, this perspective. Instead of thinking about the way she’d looked up close—that long ponytail