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Her hair had smelled sweet and the smooth strands had slid against his cheek like water. She’d looked up when he’d groaned her name and without thinking, without weighing, measuring, worrying, he’d taken her mouth and given back the kiss of a starving man.
He wanted that again. He wanted to be the one who assuaged her need—“craving”—for skin. Contact. Touch.
The lifeguard glanced over his shoulder and took in the focus of Noah’s attention. Juliet was facing the men now, her hands stuffed in her pants’ pockets, her jeans stuffed in a pair of knee-length sheepskin boots. A long-sleeved white T-shirt clung to her slender frame.
“Ah,” the lifeguard said, with a grin, as the truck started moving again. “Break a leg, buddy.”
But nobody was going to get hurt, Noah assured himself, as he continued toward Juliet. This was about helping, not hurting. With several inches still between them, he halted.
She spoke first. “What are you doing here?”
“I…” Well, hell. He hadn’t thought it through that far. He’d spotted her car and formed a plan that only went so far as finding her. Throwing her down in the sand and having sex in the surf like the famous scene in From Here to Eternity wasn’t suitable for someone like the high-class blonde now staring him down.
He shoved his hands in his pockets to disguise the way his cock had already warmed up to the idea and tried shrugging away his uneasiness. He liked women. Women liked him. Before now, he would have claimed to know all the steps to the dance and how to easily flow from one to the other until two bodies went from the first moves of foreplay to the last throes of a satisfying fuck.
But this was Juliet. And from that night he’d rushed naked into her kitchen, nothing between them had been easy.
“Noah?”
Since he didn’t have an answer, he asked his own questions. “Are you all right? What are you doing out here?”
She swung back to gaze at the ocean. Her profile was so damn classically pure it made his still-stiff cock ache. The banner the breeze made of her caramel hair had his palm itching to fist his hand in the stuff and draw her close enough to once again heat those reddened lips.
“I need to take care of Wayne’s ashes,” Juliet said. “And here might be the right place for them.”
Cold dashed over Noah’s libido like a winter wave. Oh, Christ, he thought, wanting to kick his own ass to hell and back. Here he’d been certain she was considering her next move to satisfy her skin craving when instead she was contemplating what to do with her dead husband’s remains.
“Insensitive jerk,” he muttered, cursing that sexual thug inside himself.
Juliet frowned at him. “Noah? Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Fine.” Just moving my brain back from my little head to the big one. “So, about the general’s ashes…?”
“Maybe this is their right resting place.”
As usual, she’d been pale but composed on the day he’d accompanied her to meet with the funeral director. Juliet had made all the arrangements according to her husband’s wishes. Marlys had been there, too, her gaze never lingering long on anything or anyone. The only time the general’s daughter had spoken was to request she be given some of her father’s ashes in a tear-shaped silver pendant—though Noah had never seen her with it since.
Maybe his thoughts of the younger woman transferred to Juliet. “I thought Marlys might have an opinion, but she says she doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
“You should decide for yourself.”
“That’s what I was thinking.” Juliet turned to watch another wave wash in. “Here is pretty.”
“Here is pretty,” he agreed. “It’s quiet now, on a weekday autumn morning, but in the summer it will be crowded with people. Volleyball players, surfers, bodyboarders.”
“Kids,” Juliet said, her voice so quiet it was nearly drowned by the crescendo of the latest wave. “Children playing in the sand and dipping their toes in the water.”
Children. God, that was something that had died for her, too, hadn’t it? Noah had never considered that she and her husband might have wanted a family, but from that wounded expression on her face, it looked as if she believed there were no green-eyed, blue-eyed babies in her future.
For himself, he’d never given the next generation much thought, but it seemed like a damn shame to him now, no silky-haired towheads trailing like baby ducks after their lovely mama. Clearing his throat, he pressed the heel of his hand into his chest.
“In Iraq,” he started, driven to redirect the conversation with the first thing that came into his head, “there are soccer fields in the middle of the cemeteries. Families picnic there, too. It sounds weird, but I liked it. Those that had gone before were part of what was going on now.”
