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There were all kinds of things that he found confounding about Raemy Miller. Like the fact that she gave him her full attention, always. She had a cell phone, of course, like everyone. His was in his back pocket most of the time and he turned off everything that he could, to keep it from bothering him, yet still notifications came through. When Raemy was sitting alone, he would see her look at it sometimes, scrolling through whatever was on her screen. But mostly she left it face down on the table. And when he was sitting with her, she gave him her attention instead, unlike almost every other person he knew.

As if she wanted to drink in every single thing he said.

When she’d first come here, he’d thought that it was just because she wanted to take his measure and see if she thought the wrong man had died over there, the way he certainly did.

But now it had been weeks. Six weeks, if he wasn’t mistaken, and that meant November wasn’t far away. Everything had gone Halloween in town, and—against his wishes, like every year—the men had once again thrown up Halloween decorations all over the diner.

The cheesiest and most obnoxious Halloween decorations possible.

Raemy should have been somewhere far away from here by now. Santa Fe. Roanoke. Disney World. Instead, she was still here in tiny little Wild Rose Point.

And she was still gazing at him with her absolute full attention.

“What other places are on your list?” he asked her, because he was nothing if not determined to always, always belabor a point. “I thought you were exploring the whole country.”

“I’ve already explored a whole lot of the country,” she replied, and another thing about her was that she was so disarming. Almost anyone else would immediately bristle and demand to know why he was asking that and did he want her to go… It occurred to Noah that maybe that was exactly what he’d wanted her to do. “And the really cool thing is that there’s still so much more to explore. Why? Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

That wasn’t what he meant. And he couldn’t tell if she knew that wasn’t what he meant, or if she was simply answering him honestly.

There were a lot of things he couldn’t tell when it came to Raemy.

Like, as an example he plucked from nowhere, what she wanted from him.

Everything between them was actually better than it had been that very first night, and that should not have been possible. It kept getting better.

Every touch. Every kiss. Each one putting the one before to shame.

He spent every night with her despite the fact he kept telling himself that he had to pull back. That he had to create some space. He couldn’t sleep with her every single night and not expect her to catch some feelings, could he? That wasn’t fair.

And he wanted no feelings at all to be caught. He wanted feelings to sail above them and out into the ocean, with no catching whatsoever.

But that was another thing about Raemy. She was so herself, always. She was bright and funny. She was direct. She said things that he would never have said, and certainly not so openly, and he had a mouth on him that he’d earned in the Marines.

Raemy never seemed embarrassed, about anything. Intensity, awkwardness, misunderstandings. She was completely unselfconscious in all things, as far as he could tell. Not in that way that some people were, so deliberately chill that it was clear they were performing a caricature. Raemy wasn’t like that.

She was just the most open person he’d ever met.

As far as he could tell, she’d never met a stranger. And more and more, locals would come into the diner to deliver full soliloquies and monologues to him and all the men and anyone who would listen about how wonderful she was. As if he didn’t know that.

More than a few of them were no doubt wondering why she was wasting her time on a grumpy bastard like him—because everyone in Wild Rose Point seemed to know entirely too much about Noah’s personal life, which was maybe easy as he’d never really had one to point to before—but he was glad no one actually asked him that outright. Because it wasn’t like he could answer.

He had no idea.

Tonight, he told himself every night. Tonight would be the night that he went back to his house, slept in his own bed, recalibrated, and got his fool head on straight again.

But that never happened.

This particular night, he found himself walking back to the inn with her even though it was raining outside, and cold. She’d wanted to go and see a little bit of live music in the Tufted Puffin. Raemy, naturally, somehow knew all the musicians in the band, because they were local. She had told him, with great seriousness, that she’d been looking forward to listening to them, because she’d seen them play somewhere else.

Somewhere here, in Wild Rose Point.

Because she was apparently having a life that was all hers, right here in this town that was his, but without necessarily involving him.

A lot like the only person without boundaries or parameters is you, buddy, he told himself, harshly.

Something to think about as they trudged toward her hotel room.

Anyone would have expected that even sunshiny Raemy would complain about the wet, and the rain slapping into them, and the way the ocean made everything colder and more raw. Noah had been expecting her to start finding the glumness of the weather a bit much, the way most people did. Everyone loved the beach, but not everyone could handle the ten months of wet gray.