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There was the night she’d decided to marry Wayne. When she was thirteen years old.
A rap on the glass of the French door behind her made Juliet spin around. Obscured by the mullions stood Noah, who had been repainting the flaking backyard gazebo for the past few hours. She gestured, and he swung open the door to step inside, bringing with him a blast of outdoor-scented air and the unsettling, electric presence of raw maleness.
Barefoot, Noah was dressed in a pair of ragged camouflage pants.
And nothing else.
So right there in the room with her were his uncovered powerful arms and shoulders, not to mention the rippling board of his abdomen. Above that, his naked chest, with all its muscular bends and fascinating dips. Pressing the small of her back against the edge of the island, she put more room between herself and his skin, though she couldn’t keep her gaze from inspecting every tanned inch. There was a streak of clay-colored paint under the curve of one pectoral, just three shades lighter than the hard-centered disc of his nipple.
She yanked her attention to his face, even as heated pinpricks washed from her nape to her heels. “What, um, what can I do for you?”
“I thought I heard the mail truck a while back.”
“Mmm. Yeah.” There was another scent in the air besides the green-and-fresh smell of the outdoors. She took it in, and then wished she hadn’t. The other olfactory note invading the kitchen was the toasty, soapy scent of a sun-drenched Noah and in a flash she saw herself putting her mouth to that smooth juncture of chest and shoulder and breathing him in, deep into her lungs. The tang of his sweat salty against her tongue.
“Ma’am?”
The polite prompt jarred her back to reality. Punishing herself by pushing back harder against the edge of the butcher block, she forced out a laugh. “ ‘Ma’am?’ You haven’t called me that since the first few weeks you came to work for Wayne.”
“I work for you, now,” he said. “Just trying to remind myself of that.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, bunching his pectoral muscles. “You’d appreciate if I wouldn’t what?” Noah asked. “Remember that ours is purely a boss-employee relationship?”
Those prickles burned another path down her torso and then reversed direction to rush toward her face. “Of course it’s boss-employee,” she reassured him. “I could do without the ‘ma’am,’ that’s all. Makes me feel a hundred years old.”
One side of his mouth kicked up and she stared at his lips. He hadn’t shaved, and the contrast of dark stubble to smooth skin only made it harder to look away. “Ah. It’s the older woman thing again.”
No. She didn’t care that she was older than he. Wasn’t it she who had pointed it out, after all?
And right now she didn’t feel older. Right now she just felt…different. Female to his male. Uncertain to that knowing gleam she thought she detected in his eyes.
With a whirl, she turned to her open cookbooks again. “The mail’s there in a stack by the sink. I haven’t yet separated yours from mine.”
“Then my Playboy renewal form is free from your prying eyes.”
She ignored the teasing gibe and left it to him to sort through the pieces. After a moment, though, the rustling ceased and she registered an odd, suspicious silence. Curious, she glanced over her shoulder.
Noah stood as if carved from stone, a manila envelope in his hands. Her gaze ran across the heavy bones of his shoulder blades and down the groove of his spine and she didn’t think he breathed.
“Noah?”
He didn’t respond, so she hurried to his side. Call her nosy, but she couldn’t stop herself from peering at the correspondence that had fixed his attention. “The California Bar? Noah, are these the results of your exam?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t supposed to come back until November.”
“Well, open it!”
He hesitated.
She jostled his elbow. “What are you waiting for?”
Sliding a glance at her, he gave a little smile. “You’ve never struck me as the impatient type. This is a whole new side of you, Juliet.”
“Yes, well, I’ve been surprising myself a lot just lately.” There was her sexuality, suddenly awake and somehow fixated on Noah, the man who’d just ma’amed her. And then there was that impetuosity she’d noted earlier, too. Clamoring desire and impulsive dinner invitations. “And I’m not sure I like the new me.”
“I think I do.” He tapped her nose with the envelope.
Tapped her nose with the envelope! Bubbles broke in her bloodstream, making her feel girlish and woozy and startled all over again. She shuffled back a step and his gaze returned to what he held in his hand.
