Page 43 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
“So, you opened a bookshop.”
“Asecondhandbookshop! The least fast-lane kind of business in retail.”
“Perhaps there’s more Hartmead in you that you’d care to admit.”
“There was more to it than that.” Nory wondered how much she should say. How much Isaac already knew. “I lost a friend; we all lost a friend. His name was Tristan. It was a few years ago. You’d probably remember his face if you saw a picture; hewas always with us, part of the gang. I was already feeling my own kind of lost when he died, and I realized that if I didn’t find some way of anchoring myself, I’d just float away. Does that make any sense?”
Isaac nodded. It was hard to see his expression in the dark, but Nory felt like he understood.
“I remember Thom telling me he was worried about you for a while.”
“Really? I can’t imagine that.”
“He didn’t go into details, but he’d asked me if I’d help out at the nursery for a few days if he had to go to London.”
“When was this? I don’t remember him ever coming to see me.”
“He didn’t in the end. I think your mum talked him out of it. It was a few years ago—six years? Maybe seven?”
“And you remember that?”
Isaac shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I knew it must have been bad for Thom to think he might need to go and get you.”
Nory thought back to that time. It was a sketchy period in her mind, blurred at the edges and laced with a kind of panic that even now made her chest constrict when she thought about it. She hadn’t realized her family had known she was struggling; she especially wouldn’t have expected her brother to notice.
“And what did he think he was going to do? Throw me over his shoulder and bring me back to Hartmead?”
“I honestly don’t know. He’s a good mate, but he’s not known for his tact, so I imagine he would have been met with resistance from you.”
“Yes, he probably would. But I didn’t need to be rescued, not by him anyway.”
Isaac laughed quietly. “At the risk of provoking your wrath, you are not as different from your brother as you’d like to think.”
Nory conceded the point with grace since he was walking her back in the snow. “The Noel stubbornness runs deep,” she admitted.
They reached the back door. The snow had stopped falling and begun to freeze in place. Alongside their own footprints in the gravel were those of Lord Abercrombie and his beagle, probably from their last walk of the night.
They were on the step now. A delicious tension hung between them. If Isaac moved to kiss her, she would definitely let him. They stood looking at each other. She could feel herself being pulled as though by gravity—or something more superlunary—toward him. She was so close to him that she could see the tick of the pulse in his neck. All her childish feelings of desire for him came flooding back, along with something darker and hotter. She heard his breath coming harder.This is it! He’s going to kiss me!
Then Isaac stepped back. “Lord Abercrombie doesn’t like the staff fraternizing with guests.”
Nory stopped herself mid-pucker. Desire was replaced instantly with mortification and embarrassment, like a bucket of snow had been thrown over her.
“Really? Fraternizing?” she asked incredulously. “What century are we living in?”
Isaac looked pained. “I mean, he has asked that we avoid getting romantically entangled with guests. It’s unprofessional. Takes the focus away from the job at hand. You know what hen dos can be like! And stag dos for that matter. All those horny drunken women and men...”
What the hell is going on here?thought Nory.
“Isaac, if I’ve been reading this all wrong, then please put me out of my misery. I like you and I thought you liked me.”
“I do.”
“Then what is the problem here? I’m clearly not a drunken horny hen!”
Nory’s ardor was shriveling rapidly.
Isaac rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the iron mud scraper by the door as though it might give him the right answer.
