Unravel Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

consider what their marriage might do to his young wife?
    Irritation made Noah’s voice caustic. “Shall I find some yellow pages so we can shop for walkers on the way home?”
    Her eyes widened, and he felt like a stupid, snarling dog. “Forget I said that.” He grabbed his taco and stuffed it in his mouth to prevent another careless comment.
    “If that’s an apology, I accept.” She pierced a shrimp with her fork. “And I’m not ready to sign up for the retirement home just yet. What I am going to do—I was thinking about this last night, too—is look for a job.”
    His mouth was full, so his only reply was a strangled, “Armph.”
    “Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “I have a perfectly good college degree that has surely prepared me for a job doing . . . doing . . . well, I haven’t quite figured that out.”
    He swallowed. “What did you study?”
    “Dance. I have a bachelor’s degree in dance.” She made a little face. “When I was small, my dad called me his ‘Dreamy Balleriny.’ I either had my nose in a book or my feet on the dance studio floor.”
    He could see her willowy body leaping and turning and . . . doing whatever it was that dancers did. “So you wanted to be on a stage somewhere . . .”
    She was already shaking her head. “By the time I was a senior in college, I’d figured out I didn’t have what it took to be a star. But before I could decide on what I’d do instead, my parents passed away and Wayne came into my life.”
    The general had once told Noah that he’d spent five minutes with Juliet at her parents’ funeral and had been a goner after two minutes and thirty seconds. Gazing on her golden hair and unusual eyes, Noah could sympathize.
    He toyed with the edge of his plate. “For the record, I wasn’t shocked about you wanting a job. It’s just that I hadn’t considered—”
    “That I’m actually capable of something other than looking pretty and playing hostess?”
    Whoa, whoa, whoa . He hadn’t seen that coming, but from the way Juliet had narrowed her eyes and was staring him down, she had a little tender spot on the subject about, oh, a mile wide and two miles deep. Noah wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Didn’t the general . . . ?”
    A flush crawled up her neck and she looked away. “It’s just that . . . that sometimes I feel like he didn’t think I was competent to handle things.”
    Shit . This was a conversation Noah didn’t want to continue as it came much too close to secrets he’d promised to keep. So he attempted to jump the train onto a different track by pasting a cheery smile on his face. “Okay, well. A job. Sure. We can—”
    “Noah, there isn’t going to be any ‘we.’”
    Cheery, along with his smile, died a swift death. “Of course I didn’t mean ‘we’ we, I meant—”
    “I know what you meant. But have you forgotten? You’ve taken the bar exam, Noah. You told me you have feelers out for jobs and that you’re ready to interview as soon as the test results come in.”
    He could have been interviewing without the test results, but he’d put off spending those hours away from her. “Yeah, but—”
    “It’s your time now. You’ll move on, move away. Before long there’ll be a woman who’ll stick, and you’ll get married and have a family.”
    He tried to picture that. Tried to picture the she who would stick, the she who he’d want to stick by, but no image came into his head. He’d never considered himself the marrying kind—Christ, dear old Daddy had been one hell of a husband example—and Noah had been satisfied with the sort of temporary relationships that brought a woman to his bed but not trouble to his life.
    So he shook his head. “Maybe the one who’ll get married is you.” And then he decided he didn’t like the sound of those words either. Juliet, with some other man watching out for her when it was Noah’s mission.
    “No,” she said, her voice implacable. “I won’t marry