It came down slowly until he did nothing more than hold me while I breathed him in.
"I know this is the right thing to do," he said into the crown of my head.
My eyes fluttered shut as I snuggled my face into his chest. "I do too."
I didn't, though. I wasn't entirely sure I believed that. Right. Wrong. They were so subjective based on who you were asking, weren't they?
Maybe the statement that I could agree to was that this was the smart thing to do instead. The most likely to allow him the success he was still chasing after with both hands and give me the same result.
"But I'll think about this," he admitted in a rough voice. "I'll think about you, Molly, and I want you to know that."
I had to roll my lips together to keep from telling him that I was falling in love with him. Because he had no space for something like this in his life, and I had no room for that kind of complication in mine. So all I could do, knowing we were leaving the next day, back into a world where we'd pretend this hadn't happened, was give him another soft kiss and lie about what he meant to me.
"I'll think about you too, Noah."
He pulled away from my embrace, and in a few strides of his long legs, he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Molly
The strangest part of returning to Seattle was the fact that no one seemed to notice that anything was different. When I got home, Isabel greeted me with a smile, wanting to know how the weekend went.
When Paige stopped over a couple of hours later because Emmett wanted to show us something, there were no curious, lingering looks at my face, and no one asked if something had happened.
And as protective as I felt over those two nights and what happened in that big bed, I was relieved.
For the first time since I could remember, something happened in my life that I didn't want to share with my family. My sisters were my best friends, and Paige as close as a mother to me, but I didn’t want to confide or discuss or pick apart anything about my time in South Dakota.
Normally, we would.
But the rest of my Sunday back in Seattle was just … normal.
I arrived at work, feeling rejuvenated after a good night of sleep, something I didn't have at all in South Dakota due to one Noah Griffin. And the lack of sleep from that weekend was nothing that couldn't be hidden by a good concealer, which I applied liberally when getting ready that morning.
My office was quiet and tidy when I let myself in, and I'd barely gotten through the items waiting in my inbox before a message popped up from Beatrice on my phone.
Beatrice: Would love to hear how the weekend went. I'm free after lunch.
It wasn't so much a suggestion as a summons. And I got a pit in my stomach as I thought about facing her across the expanse of her desk. Beatrice had been so very, very far from my mind in that cabin in the mountains. Her request for no fraternization had as well, something I'd broken. A few times. But there was really no point in counting how many times, honestly.
Ignoring the ramifications of what would happen if she found out, I'd already begun to formulate the opinion that all this forced proximity with Noah didn't help either of us. Especially not now. I was a glorified errand girl, hanging around the filming crew the way I'd been doing. Maybe that was the sharp, unpleasant edge to Beatrice's promotion in the first place.
Putting lipstick on a pig, so to speak.
She acted like she was doing me a favor, but in reality, the job I'd done before was more challenging, kept me busier, and on the whole, could generate just as much revenue for Washington if I did that job well.
Glancing at the filming schedule tacked to the pinboard behind my desk, I knew that Marty and Rick weren't around today. Probably at their own offices going through everything they'd caught over the weekend. As I tapped the side of my pen on the desk, I thought about the past few weeks. I thought about Marty. And Rick. The pen slowed; my heart rate sped up. And I thought about Noah.
Facing him.
Being around him.
Trying to pretend nothing had happened and watching him do the same.
It was a recipe for disaster, and I couldn't even care what it said about me that I didn't think I could shove it down and do my job. Nothing was sexy about us trying to sneak around now that we were back to reality in Seattle.
Even if we’d agreed to try, I saw nothing fun or exciting about trying to hide a relationship with him. We were both too pragmatic for that.
I pulled a pad of paper out of the top drawer of my desk and started scribbling things down. Flipping back and forth between that and my computer whenever something came up, I felt ready to meet with Beatrice by the time I'd scarfed some cold leftovers for lunch. Being away from Noah meant my head was clearer, and that was hard to admit.