Page 31 of Noel
“It’s alright.”My tone comes out gruffer than I mean it to, but she doesn’t flinch.“They had me late in life, so I was a bit of a surprise.But they were great.The real deal.A hundred percent in love till the very end.”
She exhales, a small, wistful sound.
“Sounds like a storybook.”
I smile faintly, the memory cutting both ways.
“Yeah.Guess it does.”
For a moment, the cab fills with that heavy kind of silence—the kind that doesn’t feel empty.
Her gaze lingers on me, soft and curious, and I can feel the pull again, that invisible thread tightening between us.
Lust rises in me, but it’s more than that.Holly is nothing like what I expected when Connor Callahan ambushed me in Remy Falco’s office and told me I was going to be working an assignment for his wife’s friend.
I expected a Manhattan socialite or a trust fund brat.But Holly Winters is anything but.
Truth is, I shouldn’t want her like this.
She’s my client.
My responsibility.
The line between duty and desire is razor-thin, and I can feel my boots slipping toward it every time she looks at me.
And as we turn onto my street, headlights glinting off fresh snow and the warm light spilling from the windows of my house, something deep in my chest stirs.
For the first time in years, coming home doesn’t feel like returning to an empty shell.
It feels like hope.
And damn it, I don’t know which scares me more—the faceless prick who’s been threatening her, or the woman herself for making me believe again.
Guess there’s only one way to find out.
Chapter9
Holly
Maplewood, New Jersey—Noel’s House
When the truck turns off the main road, I feel it before I see it—the quiet.
The kind that sits deep and heavy in small towns this time of year, where even the air seems to hold its breath beneath the weight of the snow.
The headlights sweep over a long driveway lined with old trees, beeches and oaks, their bare branches dusted in white.The house that comes into view is not what I expected.
It’s big, but not flashy.
Sturdy.Just like the man driving me here.
Two stories of dark wood and stone, warm light spilling from the windows, smoke curling from the chimney into the night.
The kind of thing that looks like it was built to weather storms.
It’s this big, rambling Victorian at the end of a cul de sac that’s probably worth quadruple what his parents paid back in the day.
“Wow,” I breathe.“It’s beautiful.”
