Drums were beating and she was dancing with Will. They were twirling around and around and she was giddy with the promise of what would come. Desire sparked and he laughed. She hadn’t heard him laugh before. It was a fragile sound, like a hand-blown Christmas tree ornament shattering on a wooden floor. But then the drums stopped, and Will fell silent. He held her at arm’s length and stared hard with those eyes that seemed to pull her in, then shut her out.
“Where do we go from here?” she said.
“Nowhere,” he replied, and let go.
Hannah shot up, heart racing, and punched the alarm clock. She fell back into her pillows and breathed slowly, releasing the residue of the dream, forcing Will from her mind.
Galen was coming home today. Nothing else mattered; nothing else would steal her focus.
Hannah searched her bedding for the hair tie that had fallen out overnight. No hair tie, but she found a pair of reading glasses and a Will Shepard novel—one that had been at the bottom of her reading stack for several years. She flipped to the back cover and stared at the black-and-white photo that told readers nothing about the man who had created Agent Dodds.
In the three days since the powwow, she had seen Will only from a distance. But the thoughts wouldn’t stop. They pounced during sleep and snuck up on her when she was feeding the dogs or idling at a stop sign. Why now? Why after six years was she finally distracted by a guy and he happened to be a celebrity—eleven years her junior—with a kindergarten-age son?
Hannah raked her fingernails across her scalp. Whenever Will was in her sight line, the breath sucked out of her lungs. It was childish; it was maddening; and it was wrong.
She didn’t want to be this person who wasted precious minutes applying mascara before going to work. She didn’t want to be this person who had turned out her underwear drawer to find her one and only push-up bra. She didn’t want to be this person whose chest fluttered at the sight of Will’s car.
Beyond her bedroom window, a Carolina wren whistled with such energy, such beauty. She had neglected the birds over the past few months. When Will and Jacob left, she would put up more birdfeeders, and she would keep them filled. She would even find new ways to outwit the squirrels. Projects, no matter how small, kept a person moving. Once Will had gone, that would be her quest: keep moving.
According to Poppy, Jacob was on the wait list for a place in New York and Will had visited two retirement communities near the Virginia border. What bookends of mistakes. Take Jacob out of Orange County and you might as well lock him in a cell with a loaded handgun. But Will wanted everything settled by the weekend, or so Poppy had said. Today was Tuesday.
Hannah eased aside her muslin curtain and there he was—wearing his running clothes and pacing on the gravel between the two houses. Normally, he paced on the cottage porch. Had he chosen to move closer to her territory? Ridiculous. Now she was finding meaning where there was none.
Sideways there wasn’t much of Will. Hannah swallowed. Her waist had never been as skinny, her stomach never as flat. But his forearms were surprisingly buff and his shorts revealed plenty of muscle and sinew in his calves. This was not a man who spent his life sitting behind a desk.
Will scuffed up a haze of dirt and glanced toward her bedroom, and Hannah dove for the floor. How could he possibly know which room was hers? And why, when he looked at her with those eyes, did every nerve fiber scream?