Page 65 of A Hard Habit to Break

“Be someone other than who I am? No can do, beautiful.”

She muttered under her breath. “I swear I will build this thing in record time and disappear.” That pulled him up short.

“And I swear,” he said, looking her square in the eyes, “next time you disappear, I’m coming after you with a glue gun.”

Rachel pushed his shoulder with two fingers, like a battering ram. Her fingers protested the ill-planned jab and rewarded her with a brief but definitive ache. He didn’t budge. “Don’t start imitating Pete’s masculine chest-beating,” she accused.

“Pete? He’s just a friend. You’re more.”

“A friend who loves playing master and commander, especially if a woman is in charge.”

Noah tightened his hand on hers. “That’s Pete’s thing. Not mine.”

“Birds. Feathers.” That was all she said.

“I’m a man with my own mind.”

His words rang true, but… There’d always been an unspoken tension between her and Noah when Pete entered the equation. Like Noah, Pete thrived on competition. Rachel couldn’t go there. She wouldn’t. Noah would have to show, not tell, that he valued her over his other relationships, or he didn’t. His job was to figure it out for himself. It had taken her years away to realize the choice lay with him.

“Except when buckle bunnies are fluffed and frisky, right?”

“Six, you know good and well, Leah Calvary raised me better than that. Just because I dated a lot, that doesn’t not mean I have random high heels in my closet or under my mama’s table every week.”

“How many times have you tried?”

“None, woman. That’s what I’ve been trying to show you.”

That sucked the wind from her hot balloon. “What if you’re wrong about us?”

“I’m not.” His proclamation held such surety. Rachel’s untried heart flexed her atrophied muscle. Was she ready for a second chance at forever? What about her plans to work abroad? People, whole communities, needed her. She had never questioned her value to the people she helped.

“Noah…” She sighed. “We both have plans for our lives.”

“My plan has always been you. When we were six. When we were sixteen. Heck, when we were twenty-six, I still had hope for us. Can you say the same, Six?”

Every time he called her that name, whisking her back to their day by the falls, where he promised her a house, a ring, a cat. They’d made a deal.

They stood beside Noah’s truck, people moving around them, yet they were in their own bubble, visible yet invisible.

“Can I tell you later?”

“Okay,” he said, his tone totally not as… okay as he handsomely portrayed. “I know we can’t resurrect our old relationship. But I want to be the man to give you what you want. The few hours, with just us, felt right. More than right. So, I’m asking. What do you want?”

“To know you have my back. You love calling me Six. Be that for me. I don’t want to think you’re mine, and then the miles and months apart drag us back to those two teenagers, angry and heartbroken. We lead very different lives, Noah. You love Service… I do, too. But my life is in San Diego. How can I sacrifice myself…” She bit back the “for you” part. And though her desire for him held like a stone tower, she knew the foundation could be a dangerous mix of quicksand.

“That won’t happen. Never doubt that there’s room in my life for us, together. Distance, dollars and cents, don’t matter. We can make it work.”

“You sure about that? I remember a time when you proposed marriage to keep me in this town.” When she’d first started college, she’d sketched their future a dozen times. The cabin. The moonlit view of Landing Falls from their bedroom window. The kids with his thick waves and her freckles. “My job may never lead me back to Service, Noah.”

He winked. “Gives me an incentive to be that good-at-everything boyfriend when we’re together.”

The suggestive tone of his voice made the back of Rachel’s neck grow hot before she could snap back a witty rejection of his outlandish insinuation. The sound of an approaching engine made them both turn as a cherry red pickup truck came bouncing down the dirt road, kicking up clouds of dust with its wheels. It pulled up beside them. The person inside killed the engine.

The driver’s side door opened, and a beautiful woman stepped out, her wavy red hair gleaming in the sunlight. She wore designer jeans and a snug red T-shirt that showed off adult film star boobs and alabaster, slender arms. She was the Barbie to Rachel’s Beyoncé. Noah’s easy grin faded, and a knot formed in the bowels of Rachel’s belly.

“Cheyenne, what are you doing here?”

“I extended the invitation.” Pete chuckled low and long. “You did say she is the cutest little council member we got.”