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Or maybe Marlys believed all the ugly rumors about Juliet. How she’d been callous over the fact that her husband was dying. How she hadn’t cared enough to stick by him when the very end came.
Yes, Marlys wasn’t going to provide much friendship. When Noah vacated the guesthouse across the pool, there’d be no one who—
This time the information she’d learned at the shop that night hit with the weight of a brick and sank straight to her consciousness. “Oh.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God.”
Noah spun. “Now what?”
“I think I need a glass of wine.” She headed for the refrigerator. “How about you?”
He caught her arms and drew her to him. “I’m not a wine kind of guy, honey. Surely you know that.”
Honey. The soft word made her feel all warm again, but she couldn’t be distracted by that, or by the smooth skin of his tanned, muscled chest such a very few inches away. “Noah…” She tried pulling free.
He only drew her closer. “Juliet…” he echoed. “I’m done dancing around this. You’re acting very unlike yourself.”
“That’s the problem.” She looked up into his eyes. “I don’t know who I am anymore. Not really.” That was the truth. And not just because she was smelling Noah now, taking in his scent, and feeling her inner woman instead of her inner widow responding with another wash of heat.
She tried pushing him away, but Noah’s grip firmed on her upper arms. “I’m not letting you go until you come clean with what’s set you off-kilter tonight.”
It was like trying to move a mountain. With a sigh, she went ahead and told him some of what had her teetering on her feet. “I’m not my father’s daughter.”
“Yeah?” His thumbs drew a pattern over the flat knit of her silk sweater. “What makes you say so?”
“It’s what my sisters told me.”
Surprise showed clearly on his face. “You’re an only child.”
“That’s what I thought. But tonight—just an hour or so ago—I found out that isn’t the case.” The notion seemed incredible, but the words coming from the mouths of the two women in the yarn shop had held the distinct ring of truth. “Cassandra Riley and Nikki Carmichael told me we are all products of a single sperm donor and our own separate mothers.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where did this come from? How did these women contact you?”
Juliet thought of the knitting shop on the Pacific Coast Highway, a short drive away. She remembered walking in and looking at the two women sitting together on a couch and how their jaws had dropped when they’d looked back.
“Cassandra—she has a business in Malibu—did some Internet research into her biological father. Her mother told her from childhood she was the product of an anonymous sperm donor, but only recently did she try to discover who that donor was.”
“I thought you just said ‘anonymous.’ ”
“It’s the age of the Internet. I could probably find out your deepest, darkest secret given my flying fingers and a few hours with ‘the Google.’”
He didn’t crack a smile at her little joke. As a matter of fact, at the mention of “deepest, darkest secret,” his body had tensed. A muscle in his jaw ticked.
“Noah?”
“So you’re telling me that this Cassandra…”
“Used her own flying fingers. When I was still living in the old house, she sent me an invitation to her business in Malibu. I dismissed it as some generic direct mail advertising, but when I was out for a drive tonight I saw the place and it jogged my memory. I was curious enough to stop by.” She shrugged. “I thought it was a whim at the time, but maybe fate was giving me a little nudge.”
“And inside you found your two supposed sisters.”
Sisters! It really was a strange thought. But… “I’m inclined to believe we’re related. If you listened to them, if you saw them, you’d understand why.”
“Well, I am going to see them.”
“Noah…” She shook her head, realizing she should have expected this. “There’s no need to go guard dog on me.”
“Yeah? Is that what I’m doing?”
“Yeah, that’s just what you’re doing. It’s written all over your face.” She lifted her hand to touch his hard cheek, then pressed it to his chest. “And all over the tension I can feel right here.”
Beneath her palm, his heartbeat quickened. Then her skin registered a surge of heat in his and she heard the jerky hitch in his breathing. She couldn’t continue to meet his eyes.
