Anxiety was showing on his face? “I don’t know how—”
“I’ll show you.” She drew up a folding chair next to his. “Look. I’ve already cast on the stitches. All you need to learn is how to knit.”
Bemused, he looked down at the Army green stringy stuff. “What am I making?”
“That comes second. First you have to get a feel for it.”
“Cassandra—”
“The first knitters were men. Are you going to tell me that the hero depicted in Braveheart wasn’t manly?”
He frowned. “William Wallace was a knitter?”
“Between battles,” Cassandra said, without a blink. “Where do you think those kilts came from?”
“Wait just a minute…” But Noah let the objection die as his eye caught Juliet’s across the room. There was laughter in them, a sparkling, spontaneous happiness that he realized now she’d been without as long as he’d known her. Hell, he would shear a sheep himself to see that.
And knitting was easier than sheep-shearing…and easier than it looked. Clearly he wasn’t creating anything more useful than a lopsided, tight-here, loose-there sort of caterpillar, but the actual under-over-slide-the-stitch-off-with-the-point-of-the-needle wasn’t impossible, even for his big hands. He managed to finish his cookies while he fumbled with the yarn, and let his gaze wander on occasion to his lady, who occasionally abandoned her own yarn to work the register.
And laugh with the other knitters. Chatting, admiring their projects, rubbing elbows with other women in a comfortable way he wondered if she’d ever before experienced. In the last months of the general’s life, there’d been occasional visitors, but they’d been interested in the sick man, not the lonely woman who had assigned herself his bedside post 24/7.
Except when Noah convinced her otherwise.
Guilt tried to rise, but he pushed it toward the back of his mind where those clouds lingered, and instead reveled in gladness at Juliet’s obvious light heart.
“She’s bewitched you,” a male voice said.
Jerked from his thoughts, Noah nearly stabbed himself with one of the pencil-thick needles. It was Gabe, staring at him with an expression somewhere between queasy and astonished.
Noah glanced back at Juliet, then back at the man. “Uh…”
“Not her. I mean the Froot Loop. You must have let Cassandra whip out the eye of newt and wave her wand.”
“I heard that.” The yarn shop owner hurried over, her face a little pink and her quick breaths bringing her admittedly outstanding breasts into prominence.
Noah noticed that Gabe noticed, but the other man covered his interest so quickly that he didn’t think Cassandra had a clue.
She frowned at him. “Some people find their sexuality isn’t threatened by practicing a handcraft that’s been around for centuries.”
“Some people don’t avoid their sexuality by practicing handcrafts as well as celibacy,” Gabe retorted.
“Insults won’t stop me from asking where you’ve been.” Her voice lowered as she stepped closer. “Gabe, you’ve been out of touch for days. Did you go into your hole again?”
“If I did, it wasn’t deep enough to avoid noticing the way your piece-of-shit veggie car isn’t starting like it should. I’ll take a look at it tomorrow.”
“What do you know about cars that run on used vegetable oil?” she asked, hand on her hip.
“I know that it makes as much sense for a car to be fueled by what fried my onion rings as it does for a man to be fed by bran muffins instead of ones made from blueberries and cream cheese.”
The woman gasped. “Onion rings? Cream cheese muffins? Have you no thought to your cholesterol, your heart?”
“My heart, Cassandra, is my own damn business.”
The air crackled around the two as they continued their familiar food argument. Noah rolled his eyes and then sent Juliet a pointed look across the room. Can we just get them a room or something?
Her mischievous smile messaged back. Go ahead. You mention it and I’ll dive beneath the couch to escape the fallout.
He grinned—then felt the expression on his face die. Shit, that was strange. Of course he couldn’t really read her mind, but it was odd enough to even imagine he could. There’d been times in combat when he was certain he knew what Tim or Dean was thinking, but that was training kicking in…not—not—
Oh, God.
“I thought it was just sex,” he murmured to himself. “A purely hormonal kind of thing.”
Next to him, someone snorted. “I could have told you it was much more than ‘just sex’ the first time I saw you with her.”