be behind her, or she’d thought of something else to say to him. She turned, suddenly, right next to that brown recliner he hated so much, the back of her foot catching on the sloppy stack of newspapers. In a split second, she reeled backward, one of her arms going out to restore her balance, and he could’ve let her ass hit the arm of the chair, an unplanned sit-down that might’ve jostled Jonah’s box but certainly wouldn’t have hurt her.
He didn’t, though.
He reached out and caught her hand.
Palm to palm. A clap as they both curled their fingers to grip each other.
A seal.
He was bent slightly over her, and up close like this he could see everything: the fine, wispy hairs that quivered along her hairline. The impossibly small flecks of gold hiding like a secret in her blue eyes. The irregularity he’d seen before in her left cheek—not a dimple, but a thin, straight scar, barely visible. The flash of white from her slightly crooked bottom teeth when her lips parted in surprise.
The thudding pulse in her neck.
Holy shit, he thought. Holy shit, the palm of her hand.
It felt like an electric shock. All the way up his left arm. All the way through to his heart.
Let go, some distant part of his brain said. This is dangerous to you.
But he wasn’t really listening to his brain. He was listening to his heart, which had been shocked right out of its hiccup, beating in time with her pulse. He watched as she watched him—as she looked up at all the up-close things she could see about him, too. He thought it would be the easiest thing, to pull her closer. She only had to say, and he’d do it. He’d catch her full bottom lip with his own; he’d—
“Is there someone else?”
He blinked, and straightened. Barely realized that their hands were still clasped, even though they were both fully upright now. Her voice had been low, almost a whisper.
No, he wanted to say. There isn’t.
But he actually had no idea what she was asking, what with his brain having jumped ship. So instead he said, “Someone else?”
Along her neck, he could still see her pulse. “I—um.”
She cleared her throat and took the smallest step away from him, dropping her eyes. He immediately loosened his hand, opening his mouth to apologize—what had he been doing, holding on to her like that?—but she rushed out the next part of her sentence.
“I only thought—listen, you obviously don’t have any interest in this place. But don’t you think someone else in your family might? Maybe they could buy it off of—”
Like that, his brain came fully back online. Easy: she was the enemy again.
“I’m an orphan,” he snapped, cutting her off. “And Donny was, too, eventually, so I guess we had that in common. No siblings, no cousins. So no, Nora. There’s no one else.”
Everything he could see of her flushed. From her wispy-haired hairline all the way down to the place where the pulse beat along her neck.
He almost regretted it, almost wished he could take it back. As best he could, he tried not to bring it up with people; it was nearly always embarrassing for everyone involved. It wasn’t so much that it was hard for him to say it—he’d had a lot of time to get used it, after all. It was more that it was hard for people to hear it. They’d stumble through some kind of apology, or worse, ask questions he didn’t want to answer. Bringing it up now—when she was still standing close enough that she could’ve taken his hand again, if she’d wanted to—it felt like a cheap shot.
But it was a cheap shot that saved him, because for a second there, he’d almost forgotten why Nora Clarke was not for him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and to her credit, she didn’t stumble at all. “I really, really am.”
He shrugged, and he hoped he made it look casual. Unaffected. “I’d like to get back to it, if you don’t mind.”
“Right, of course,” she said, carefully taking a step to the side, avoiding the newspapers. This time, he didn’t even try following her to the door.
But when she got there, she paused and turned back toward him. “I’ll see you,” she said, but he didn’t really notice that particular echo.
Instead, what he noticed—what he thought about long after she left—was how she’d been using the thumb of one of her hands to rub the palm