“You like it? It was my grandfather’s.” His voice held pride of family and tradition.
“Hm.” That’s when it hit her. Noah was a for-real cowboy. She didn’t date cowboys. Not country boys nor urban cowboys, or poseurs.
A Texan by birth, she’d never had a thing for men who wore big-brimmed hats and wouldn’t take them off even inside restaurants and movie theaters. That was rude. Everybody worth spit in Texas owned at least one pair of boots. But she avoided men who wore boots that looked more like trophies than footwear.
Her gaze skimmed down his denim-clad legs, though she had to drag them past his package, to where his legs disappeared in to the darkness beneath the steering wheel.
She couldn’t see his feet. But did it matter?
Her gaze rose with a question. He held her look for a beat and the heat in the space between them expanded.
Oh lord, they weren’t going to stop. He was going to kiss her again and she was going to let him. In a minute, they’d be snatching each other naked, and enjoying every second of it.
The glaring headlights of a passing car followed by the sustained blare of a horn broke the moment.
Carly blinked, trying to pull back from the sexual lure of the man before her. He’d just told her that he thought the man who wanted him dead could be a colleague, perhaps someone he thought of as a friend. What kind of man made enemies like that? What sort of man was Noah? Really. Up to now she’d been operating on instinct … and lust. There was one way to find out in a hurry.
“Tell me about your ex-wife.”
He blinked. “Now?”
“Now.” Let her be a Miss Sugar Mill of Texas runner-up, maybe. Or a barrel-rider sorority girl. Something so far from her experience that the disconnect between them would be glaringly apparent even to him.
Noah moved back behind the wheel, but he held on to her hand. “Her name was Jillian Tilson. We met through mutual friends. She was fun. The life of the party. Not the most beautiful woman in the room, but no man could take his eyes off her.” He gave his head a tiny shake. “I was just an average guy. Not much for partying. But after she’d flirted with everybody in the room that night she chose me. I couldn’t believe my luck. And she stuck.”
“She sounds like a dream girlfriend.”
“Yeah. Only the kind of dream varied with her moods. Nobody had higher days. Or darker nights.” He began drawing gentle circles on her palm with his thumb. “A few months into our relationship, I asked her how she saw us. I never believed she’d stay yet, against my better judgment, I was falling hard. She surprised the hell out of me by proposing. She said I was a rock to her river.”
“You channeled her energy and evened her out.”
Noah’s thumb stilled. “How do you know that?”
Carly nodded. “My husband said he was attracted to my American industriousness and earnestness. He was French and didn’t take life seriously. So you married.”
Noah nodded, his thumb skimming her palm. “Most folks don’t like the unpredictability in daily life of being a first responder’s spouse. Jillian said she liked that she could never be sure when I’d turn up, or even if. She thrived on the adrenaline of knowing I was risking my life every time I went out the door. She said it made her crave me.”
He looked up curiously at Carly. She shrugged, not sure she wanted to put into words what she was feeling. It felt unsafe.
“It worked for two years. But then we started fighting. About everything. She never wanted children. She even made it a condition of marriage.”
Surprised washed through Carly. She might not know many things about Noah, but she did know, without a doubt, that he was a family man. “You thought she’d change her mind.”
He nodded. “Sounds lame when you say it. But, yeah.” He expression sobered and his thumb stilled in the well of her palm. “Then Jillian turned up pregnant.”
A little chill ran over Carly’s skin. “What happened?”
“I was over the moon. Thrilled. She reacted like I had raped her. Said I’d betrayed our relationship. And then she walked out.”
He took a deep breath that shuddered through his body, as if the ugly memory was still alive, somewhere deep. “She was gone four days. I assumed she’d had an abortion. But she hadn’t. She told me if I wanted a baby so badly she’d have it. But she wanted out of the marriage after the birth.”
Carly held her breath, unable to think of a thing to say.
“She played her part. God, she was the best pregnant woman ever. Never complained, looked radiant all nine months. Had every one of our friends convinced I was the luckiest bastard on the planet. And then Andy was born.”
A softness came into Noah’s face that Carly hadn’t seen before. “Andy was beautiful, even covered in afterbirth. They handed him to me in the delivery room and he peed all over my shirt. I knew then I’d never let go. Do whatever it took to keep my son safe.”