Page 61 of The Wrong Brother

I want to get on my knees. Crawl to her, wrap my arms around her. And tell her about all the grief and confusion and anger my life has wrought.

“He took my home from me.”

That’s all I’ll give her. She doesn’t need to knowwhyColorado is important. She doesn’t need to know about my father, or the illness that came quickly, or the way my mother moved on so fast it gave me whiplash.

Emma looks down at her bruised wrist before lifting her gaze back to mine. “For what it’s worth...” she hesitates. “I’m on your side.”

The words bury themselves deep inside, and I feel my knees go weak…closer, closer, to kneeling for her.

“Provided,” she adds quickly, “you don’t involve me in anything illegal.”

There it is.

Emma’s line in the sand. The boundary. The wall.

Oddly enough, I find myself grateful for it. And I’m smirking, just a little. Because if she didn’t have boundaries, I might already be crossing too many of my own.

“I can agree to that.”

“Really?”

“Mostly.”

“Ruslan.”

I sigh. “Yes.”

She relaxes slightly. Not much, but it’s enough.

The problem is that I can’t stop looking at her. At the bruises and exhaustion beneath her eyes and the stubborn courage that keeps surfacing every time life knocks her down.

I want to know everything.

The thought arrives suddenly. Violently.

I want the missing pieces. The secrets. The reasons she reacts the way she does.

Why she notices security placements.

Why she lies all the time, or wants to, and why she’s so damn bad at it. There’s something in her that’s inherently good, and that’s reason enough to understand I don’t deserve to know this woman.

The contract explicitly forbids a background investigation. I agreed to it.

Yet the temptation remains.

We’re interrupted by a low rumble, and we each look down at her belly. She covers it with a hand self-consciously, a blush tinting her cheeks.

I clear my throat. “Lunch.”

She looks up. “What?”

“They took you from the coffee shop. You’re obviously still hungry. I have some business plans to look over, but after, I’d like to take you to lunch.”

Her nose scrunches up, and I add quickly, “Nowhere fancy. A food cart, if that’s what you want.”

That earns a laugh. She bites her lip, those weather eyes searching mine, and then she nods. “Okay. Sure. I can wait a little bit.”

I force myself toward the desk. Toward work. Try to ignore the rustle of her moving through the suite behind me, settling in somewhere. Her deep sigh.