Page 59 of Truthfinder’s Promise

She shrugged. “This is my home.”

He looked at her. “You’re rich, right?”

Another shrug.

“So you could sell this place and get anything you wanted. You’re not doing upkeep on anything but the common spaces, and you’ve already said it’s nothing but bad memories. So why do you do it?”

Her attention turned back to the wall she’d been inspecting, and he thought she wouldn’t answer. He didn’t push. He’d meant it when he said he didn’t want her to feel obligated. She came to the end of the wall, dusted her hands off on her jeans, and walked over to him.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because this place makes you unhappy.”

She took a step closer. He was barely taller than her when she had heels on, but she tilted her head to look up at him. “So why do you care?”

He knew two things with that single question. One, that she wasn’t going to answer him, and two, that she was asking a question that could take them somewhere he wasn’t sure either of them was ready to go.

It’s just sex, she’d told him in the car. They were never supposed to have been anything more. Not months ago, not now. Their chemistry was phenomenal, but chemistry could fade. Meredith was young and beautiful and rich. She didn’t need him. He had no idea if she wanted him.

Why did he care if she was unhappy? “Because I care about you, darlin’.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t have to pretend this is more to you than it is.”

Interesting choice of words. More to him. “You’re the Truthfinder. Was I lying?”

“You can care about someone for any number of reasons. Because your ex-girlfriend nearly killed them and you feel guilty. Because they are your best chance of finding your sister. Because—”

“Because you like them. Because you want nice things for them. Because before you ended up in a basement, you wondered if there was any chance at all that a woman that smart and that beautiful would ever be interested in you for anything more than a good time.”

“You don’t know I’m smart.” Meredith latched onto that as the safest part of everything he’d said to respond to.

“You do calculus for fun at breakfast.”

So he’d noticed that. Apparently it had been so long since she’d had a man actually pay attention to her, she’d forgotten that some of them did. “It’s meditative,” she mumbled, staring at his chest.

He made a noncommittal sound and tilted her chin up to meet his gaze. His fingers stroked along the edge of her jaw. “So would you be? Interested?”

Dear goddess, having this conversation was such a bad idea. “If things…hadn’t happened the way they did, if we were just two people and you hadn’t been taken, what would you have done?”

“I would have asked you to be mine. Would you have said yes?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.” He caught her waist and pulled her in. She opened her eyes. “But we aren’t just two people. There’s everything between us and it’s complicated. We can’t promise each other anything.”

“Then we don’t make promises. I just want to know if you’re willing to see where it goes, or if I need to put that to rest right now.”

Of course she wanted to see where it went. But every instinct honed from early childhood was screaming at her to say no. To stop this before it started. Because it was complicated, and the likelihood of them being anything when this was over was next to nothing. She’d end up hurt.

I would have asked you to be mine. “I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered.

“Do what?”

“Trust.”

“I’m not sure anyone really does. People screw up relationships all the time. I think that’s pretty normal. Most people have to fail at something a few times before they get it right.”

She didn’t want to screw this up. She wanted to be fixed. To not be so broken she couldn’t go into something with the actual hope that it could work out. She didn’t want to be having this conversation, making these decisions.

She smoothed the worry from her face. She boxed the hope and the fear away, shoved them down, and looked up at him with a playful smile. “You sound so wise. Is it because you’re so very, very old?”