Who would have thought that one of the most notorious bad boys of Instagram would be frantic with nerves, near shaking under my touch? I thought he was the king of game, but in this moment, he had very little. I’d never seen Noah Hansley speechless before. It was endearing.
He looked at me with awe. With confusion, too.
“I know what a man like you wants.” I leaned in an inch closer, keeping my hands solidly on his knees, and whispered seductively, “What youneed.” Noah wasn’t breathing. I waited a second and said, “New shoes.”
A smile cracked the frozen expression on his face, and I moved away. On the bench next to him, I held out a hand expectantly. “Give me your phone.”
Noah found his voice again and asked, “Why?”
“I’m giving you my number,” I said, pleased when he handed me his unlocked phone. “I need to approve the next set of shoes you buy.”
He leaned back into the bench. “I can Google shoes, you know.”
“Or you can ask me.” I typed away at his phone, saving my number. I paused on his background; it was a picture of him and Daphne, standing side to side in the middle of a field. “You and your sister are really close.”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “It’s been the two of us for a while.”
“She mentioned something about that.”
I expected him to be upset that I knew, but instead, he let out a small laugh. “Yeah, she’s not a very good secret keeper.”
“It’s a secret, then?”
“Of course not.” His eyes—no longer laced with nerves—peered at me. “I just don’t advertise it to the world, that’s all.”
“I’m not the world.”
His expression warmed. “No, you’re not.”
Noah examined me, a thoughtful expression on his face. It was the first time I had seen that look, and it made me uncomfortable. Like he had already let his image drop and now leaned in entirely to this version of himself, the one who was more boyish and sweeter than anyone could have assumed, considering it was typically hidden beneath a layer of swagger.
I cleared my throat, anxious to change the subject. “Anyways, we should talk about Aruba. Are you packed?”
Disappointment flickered across his expression, there and then gone. It must have been a fluke. There was no way Noah would want to sit on a bench in the cold, discussing family and health problems with me.
“I’m more of a throw a bunch of clothes in a bag in the morning kind of guy,” he said.
It was a fact universally acknowledged that for every woman who wrote a detailed packing list, there was a man who would throw a handful of clean underwear into a bag at the last minute and call it done.
“Can’t relate,” I said. “It took twenty minutes to decide which bathing suits to bring.”
He chuckled. “Which ones made the cut?”
“You’ll have to see,” I said with a small smile.
Noah’s phone vibrated in my hands. I glanced down, checking the familiar notification. “Oh perfect, your Uber’s here.”
He looked confused. “I didn’t order an Uber.”
“I did”—I shoved his phone into his hands and pulled him up by the elbow—“on your behalf.”
“What the hell, Macey?”
No amount of protesting could hide the way he leaned most of his weight onto his right leg.
Throwing on my backpack and holding my reusable waterbottle in one hand, I nudged him toward the trail exit. “The Uber will only wait five minutes before you’re charged. C’mon, I know a shortcut.”
“I shouldn’t be paying for an Uber at all,” Noah protested, followed by another push to his shoulder blades. “How are you this strong? You’re like five feet tall.”
