She opened her mouth to answer—a quick, uncomplicated yes. But that Will had asked at all made her close it again before frowning down at her hands and thinking. Even if her answer was basically going to be the same, she wanted to at least consider the question.

“He is, yeah. He’s going through something, I think, which probably has to do with whatever this move idea is about. But he’s a good boss. I owe him a lot.”

His answer was a quiet noise: not quite assent, not quite disagreement. Acknowledgment, and nothing more.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I left you sitting out there for so long.”

He shrugged. “I did the dishes. Started reading the instruction manual for the light fixture.”

God, she did not feel like installing a light fixture tonight. Not now, not after everything. In fact at the moment she felt like building a time machine and going back to the minutes before her phone had started ringing. If she could do it again, she probably would ask him to call her baby, no matter how guilty it would make her feel later.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I doubt I’ve got the hand-eye coordination for working with electricity tonight.”

Given her own feelings about the whole thing, she should have been relieved. But instead she was unaccountably disappointed now that there wasn’t a reason for him to stay.

“Yeah, of course. It’s so late.”

She turned to her desk, closed her notebook, fished her phone out from the space it’d fallen into behind her keyboard. When she swiveled back so she could stand, though, she found Will had taken a step into the room and now held out a hand to her.

She looked at it, then up at him, returning his soft, inside-joke smile. When she slid her palm against his, he grabbed hold of her and pulled her up to him. This, she thought, when she landed against his body, his other arm steadying her around the waist. This is the direction you want to be tugged in.

He kept tugging, in fact—kept hold of her hand while he walked her down the hall, past the bathroom and to the doorway of her bedroom. She halted him at the threshold, confused. “You’re not going?”

He looked down at her. “Do you want me to?”

“No,” she said quickly. “But I wasn’t sure if—”

Another tug, this one bringing their bodies flush, and then he released her hand to put both his arms around her instead. He ducked his head, put his lips close to her ear.

“Nora,” he whispered, and a delicious shiver went through her body, everything tense from the day and night somehow falling away. “I think we both know I’m not just coming over to deal with your bathroom fixtures.”

She pressed her secret smile against his chest.