Along her neck, he could still see her pulse. “I—um.”

She cleared her throat and took the smallest step away from him, dropping her eyes. He immediately loosened his hand, opening his mouth to apologize—what had he been doing, holding on to her like that?—but she rushed out the next part of her sentence.

“I only thought—listen, you obviously don’t have any interest in this place. But don’t you think someone else in your family might? Maybe they could buy it off of—”

Like that, his brain came fully back online. Easy: she was the enemy again.

“I’m an orphan,” he snapped, cutting her off. “And Donny was, too, eventually, so I guess we had that in common. No siblings, no cousins. So no, Nora. There’s no one else.”

Everything he could see of her flushed. From her wispy-haired hairline all the way down to the place where the pulse beat along her neck.

He almost regretted it, almost wished he could take it back. As best he could, he tried not to bring it up with people; it was nearly always embarrassing for everyone involved. It wasn’t so much that it was hard for him to say it—he’d had a lot of time to get used it, after all. It was more that it was hard for people to hear it. They’d stumble through some kind of apology, or worse, ask questions he didn’t want to answer. Bringing it up now—when she was still standing close enough that she could’ve taken his hand again, if she’d wanted to—it felt like a cheap shot.

But it was a cheap shot that saved him, because for a second there, he’d almost forgotten why Nora Clarke was not for him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and to her credit, she didn’t stumble at all. “I really, really am.”

He shrugged, and he hoped he made it look casual. Unaffected. “I’d like to get back to it, if you don’t mind.”

“Right, of course,” she said, carefully taking a step to the side, avoiding the newspapers. This time, he didn’t even try following her to the door.

But when she got there, she paused and turned back toward him. “I’ll see you,” she said, but he didn’t really notice that particular echo.

Instead, what he noticed—what he thought about long after she left—was how she’d been using the thumb of one of her hands to rub the palm of the other.

The palm that had been pressed to his.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

“He’s not happy.”