Don't Let Go(14)

Noah nodded and patted Patrick on the shoulder as he walked around him. “Again, good to meet you. Y’all have a good day,” he said, setting his mug on the nearest table and making a beeline for the door.
I followed him, my heart slamming loudly in my ears. “Um, Noah,” I said for absolutely no reason at all. Other than that things felt unfinished and I had the crazy guilty feelings of being caught cheating on someone. Which was truly nuts, considering I owed neither of them anything.
“Jules—” he said, turning to meet my eyes for a second. In that second, I saw the last traces of the kids we were and the intensity that had defined us. Then his expression cleared and he was the stoic adult again. “Thanks for the coffee.”
I watched him walk down the steps, take a pause at the bottom to glance back at the porch, and then disappear behind bushes that were in severe need of grooming.
“Old boyfriend?” Patrick asked, standing right behind me so close I jumped.
“It’s—” I blew out a breath and shut the door. “I told you, we grew up together.”
A laugh rumbled in his chest and I turned to face him and his beautiful eyes. The eyes that had originally seduced me at a pizza place, of all places, before they’d pulled me to a pitcher of beer, two ice cream cones, and sex on my living room floor. Everything about him was reckless and dangerous and not my game.
“You know what that tells me, beautiful?” he said while planting a kiss on my nose. “It says he was the first to spread those pretty—”
“Please don’t finish that sentence,” I said, putting two fingers against his lips.
He took my fingers into his mouth and nibbled them until I laughed and pulled them away. “So I’m right.”
“Don’t you have a site to go check on or something?” I said as he pulled me into his arms.
“Told you, there’s a delay,” he said. “I do have some research to do though if I can bum off your wireless.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You brought your laptop with you?”
He dropped some kisses on my lips and let go gently. “When you never get to go home, babe, everything lives in the car with you.”
As Patrick walked outside, I turned and walked the few steps to the nearest couch and gripped the back of it for grounding. My gaze fell on the painting across the room. The one Noah had zeroed in on like a bloodhound. A black and gray depiction of the park, the river, the bench. Our bench. A painting I’d done for my son, to mark his first Christmas, even though he’d never see it. One that even my mother had never known the inspiration for—but my only claim to a day I could never get back. I’d sat on that bench every day for weeks after Noah left, replaying the day, sketching and resketching the rough concept. Withdrawing into myself a little more. Praying he’d come back. But he didn’t. And after I finished the painting, I stopped going.

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As I watched Patrick go through his quick morning routine, I realized I never thought much about his life before. I was trying desperately to now. I needed something to pull my thoughts away from Noah’s revelation, and Patrick was outstanding in that capacity. He was all about distraction.
And what an odd life that would be, running a contracting company. In order to stay in demand, his men had to be available to go anywhere, and so did he. He was always mobile, always on the move to the next job.
That worked for me.
Patrick was so outside my normal realm of anything, so free-spirited and daring, that having him around there in Copper Falls all the time—actually dating—would have been horrific. We would have never made it past the pizza. Well, yeah. We would have. That night was a weak moment on my part, but there definitely wouldn’t have been a second pizza.
I kept taking deep breaths as I got dressed, trying to find normal. It wasn’t anywhere near me.
“Come on, fool, get it together,” I said under my breath.
I pulled on a pair of worn soft jeans and my favorite soft fuzzy blue sweater. Not that it mattered that it matched my eyes perfectly or anything. Because it didn’t matter. I couldn’t care less whether Noah Ryan showed up in the vicinity of the diner or anything.
It was about comfort. I never wore jeans to work. I was adamant about professionalism. Not skirts like my mother always insisted on, but it was at least slacks.
Not today.
Today, moving up from my robe was a Herculean task.
Noah was back. He was engaged to be married. He’d come to my house. And his wife-to-be was having his baby. All this was within the same twenty-four hours. My carefully structured world was wiggling. To hell with wiggling, it was swinging around like a damn lasso.
I grabbed my keys from the bowl at the bottom of the stairs and then paused, remembering Patrick was still there. I leaned over to catch a glimpse of him sitting at the kitchen island with his laptop, eyebrows knitted together as he read.
“I have to go, you okay here?” I said. The shock of my own words tingled over me. Did I just give someone free reign of my house? What if Becca played hooky again and came home to find him there? “Um, I mean—”
Patrick looked up as I walked up behind him, a smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“I’m done, beautiful. Don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t,” I said, attempting to cover with a savvy smile.
He closed up his computer and rose, brushing my lips with a soft kiss. “I know.” He winked at me. “Come on, let’s go kick this day in the ass.”
Nothing sounded better than that.

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