Unravel Me by Christie Ridgway Page B

instead she was contemplating what to do with her dead husband’s remains.
    “Insensitive jerk,” he muttered, cursing that sexual thug inside himself.
    Juliet frowned at him. “Noah? Are you all right?”
    “Yeah. Fine.” Just moving my brain back from my little head to the big one. “So, about the general’s ashes . . . ?”
    “Maybe this is their right resting place.”
    As usual, she’d been pale but composed on the day he’d accompanied her to meet with the funeral director. Juliet had made all the arrangements according to her husband’s wishes. Marlys had been there, too, her gaze never lingering long on anything or anyone. The only time the general’s daughter had spoken was to request she be given some of her father’s ashes in a tear-shaped silver pendant—though Noah had never seen her with it since.
    Maybe his thoughts of the younger woman transferred to Juliet. “I thought Marlys might have an opinion, but she says she doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
    “You should decide for yourself.”
    “That’s what I was thinking.” Juliet turned to watch another wave wash in. “Here is pretty.”
    “Here is pretty,” he agreed. “It’s quiet now, on a weekday autumn morning, but in the summer it will be crowded with people. Volleyball players, surfers, bodyboarders.”
    “Kids,” Juliet said, her voice so quiet it was nearly drowned by the crescendo of the latest wave. “Children playing in the sand and dipping their toes in the water.”
    Children. God, that was something that had died for her, too, hadn’t it? Noah had never considered that she and her husband might have wanted a family, but from that wounded expression on her face, it looked as if she believed there were no green-eyed, blue-eyed babies in her future.
    For himself, he’d never given the next generation much thought, but it seemed like a damn shame to him now, no silky-haired towheads trailing like baby ducks after their lovely mama. Clearing his throat, he pressed the heel of his hand into his chest.
    “In Iraq,” he started, driven to redirect the conversation with the first thing that came into his head, “there are soccer fields in the middle of the cemeteries. Families picnic there, too. It sounds weird, but I liked it. Those that had gone before were part of what was going on now.”
    “Wayne would like that, too.” Juliet sank into the soft sand and drew up her knees to wrap her arms around them. “He’d want to be part of where people are living and laughing and enjoying nature. That works, I think.”
    Noah joined her and they sat in a silence almost as companionable as they had once been. Before he’d kissed her.
    A better man would regret that too-brief embrace. But a childhood when hunger gnawed at his belly more often than not had trained him to snatch the goodies whenever he could. A breeze kicked up and caught Juliet’s hair, its ends flying against his face.
    He let them tickle his skin. He let them tickle his libido to life, too, as he imagined himself twisting his fingers in her hair and bringing that soft mouth toward his so he might kiss the sadness from her face. He’d kiss her, hold her, run his hands over all that smooth skin and those slender curves until she didn’t remember anything, anyone but him.
    Everything but the two of them would be taken out to sea on the waves of what he wanted from her—what he had wanted for years but had made do instead with other kisses, other curves, other faces and skin. He’d wallowed in other perfumes to cover his desire for the only one that called to him.
    She wanted touch and he wanted to touch. Couldn’t it be as simple as that? For as short as it lasted?
    “Tell me about Iraq.”
    The sound of her voice jerked him from his thoughts. “What?”
    She held her hair back with her hand and gazed at him with that unbalancing combination of blue and green. “Death letters. Cemeteries. I feel bad. I’ve never asked you about your experiences as