Love at First - Kate Clayborn Page 0,39

think anyone noticed, if you’re worried about it.”

She looked over at him. “You noticed.”

“Well,” he said, which was not an answer. But the real answer—that he noticed nearly everything about Nora Clarke—wouldn’t do him or her any good at all.

“Do you ever feel like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like the feeling I had tonight. Like Nonna was with me. Do you ever feel like that, about your parents?”

“Not really. They weren’t all that with me when they were alive.”

As soon as it was out of his mouth—loose, thoughtless, immediate—he regretted it. He clamped his mouth shut and ground his teeth together. He did not do this. He did not talk about his parents to anyone, not beyond the barest, shallowest facts. What they did for a living, when they’d died. Anything more ended up reflecting poorly on them, and probably on him, too. And now, to Nora—to a woman who, by virtue of her association with Donny, was already too close for comfort when it came to his messy family history—he’d made his mom and dad sound selfish or negligent or something worse. He’d made himself sound grudging, resentful, petty.

Childish.

Why hadn’t he said something blandly comforting, something vaguely commiserating? He did it all the time at work. He had all kinds of canned answers, stacked up inside him like they were on pantry shelves.

But with Nora, it seemed like he could never quite reach for one when he needed to. With Nora, it seemed like he didn’t have those answers at all.

She turned her shoulders again so she faced him, that look of gentle invitation in her eyes, and that’s when he realized that she hadn’t really agreed to the subject change after all. She’d simply found another way in. Part of him admired her for it, same as the way he admired her for this poetry reading, no matter that it was making his life damned inconvenient. It was sly and soft and strangely disarming.

But another part of him wanted far, far away from it.

Away from her, and the things she made him feel, and what those feelings made him fear.

He should’ve never followed her in here.

“Do you—” she began, but he cut her off.

“I should go,” he said, maybe a bit more sharply than he intended. “I have a dumpster being delivered tomorrow.”

She blinked. “A . . . dumpster?”

He reached up, pulled the laurel wreath off his head. “Getting rid of some things,” he said. Most everything, he thought.

This feeling, he thought.

He held out the laurel wreath to her, and she looked down at it, then back up at him. This look, it was worse than any of the smiles he’d seen on her face tonight. It was part confusion, part embarrassment, and all disappointment. He almost wished he didn’t have his glasses on.

He concentrated on keeping his hand steady while he waited for her to take the wreath from him, but eventually, it became clear she wouldn’t. Instead, she lifted her own crown of flowers back onto her head, smoothed the front of her summer green dress. When she met his eyes again, her own were perfectly, icily dry.

“Keep it,” she finally said.

And she didn’t smile as she moved past him.

Chapter 7

After poetry night, Nora made a decision.

She didn’t need to see Will Sterling to sabotage him.

She didn’t need to see his windswept hair or his terrific spectacles or the dark, watchful eyes behind them. She didn’t need to see his smile or his frown or the little furrow he got in his brow. She definitely did not need to see the way he moved his body—strolls and leans and hands-in-his-pockets postures—and she did not need to see how quickly he could move that body when he so clearly wanted to get away from her.

No, Nora could do what she needed to do without interacting with Will Sterling at all, and she’d started by making it difficult for him to find a place to put that dumpster.

It hadn’t been any sort of challenge, not really—a few calls to neighbors in the surrounding buildings, a few requests to park in pretty specific places. The good thing about being loyal—about being neighborly!—was that you could make requests like this, and you could always count on enough people to help you out. By 6:00 a.m. on dumpster day, there was a line of cars right out front, and every spot in the back alley parking was taken. If Will had been hoping for a short back-and-forth trip to trash poor Donny’s things, he’d

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