Page 16 of Strict Confidence (Rochester Trilogy 2)
So I browse eBay trying to find the right combination of keywords that will give me the exact board game Paige loves to replace the one that burned.
Though nothing will really fix the fact that her Vermont Avenue had a bent corner. Or that her Chance card deck had been chewed by the kitten. Or that this was the same set passed down from her father, Rhys Rochester, who had played the game as a child.
It’s an heirloom, and it’s gone.
Beau walks into the room while I’m busy scrolling through eBay and a million Facebook Shopping posts. I tense, because I’m not sure who he is to me now. I’m not sure what he expects from me now. Not sex, that much is clear.
But I don’t know how to go from lover to stranger.
Is he Beau or is he Mr. Rochester?
Whatever I call him, he’s a man I care about far more than I should.
He said he loved me when the house was burning, but maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe it’s something he said in the heat of the moment. Men say I love you during sex. It could be that believing you’re going to die is the same way—temporary emotion powered by adrenaline. But I know the truth. He did mean it.
You said you love me, I told him.
He hadn’t denied it. It doesn’t matter. My love is dangerous.
He looks windblown and severe, though considerably less intimidating when Kitten trails in after him, looking windblown as well. “Kitten,” I whisper, and she does a hopping jump over to me. I press my face into her supersoft fur and breathe in her scent. Though it’s tinged with something medicinal. “Did the vet give her a clean bill of health?”
“Yes,” he says softly, his dark eyes stormy.
“Then what’s wrong?”
He glances where Paige sleeps on the window seat across from me.
There’s no slip in his expression. A stranger might not see the worry, the fear, the deep hope he has for her emotional recovery, but I can. A stranger might not see the pain that pulls at him, stabs at him, the pain in his leg that he seems determined to hide. He didn’t hide it after the fall. He used his crutches even as he cursed at them. It’s only now, after the fire, as if he thinks he brought the disaster down on us with his own fragile humanity.
Paige has been napping most of the afternoon. That’s normal, according to my preliminary Google searches about recovering from trauma. The body needs sleep to heal. So does the brain, it says. But I wonder if we need to do something for her. A therapist, maybe. I’m not sure what Beau will think about that.
He comes to stand close, murmuring low so as not to wake her. “The fire chief let me come in and take some things from the scene, so I looked through the wreckage. Nothing much was salvageable, but I boxed up what I could find. I stacked it in the back.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything yet. They gathered evidence, but he hasn’t made his determination yet. I’m going to meet him in a couple days and get his final ruling when he releases the scene.”
Unease clenches my stomach. I want a ruling, because it will put my mind at ease. But what if the ruling isn’t what I want? “I’ll see if any of her stuff is in there. We can wash out the smoke.”
“Hell, buy her all new shit. Make it fucking expensive.” Another glance to the sleeping child. And a sigh. “But yeah, she would rather have her old clothes.”
“Maybe I would rather have my old clothes, too.”
He gives me a hard look. Everything I wore before was from Walmart or Goodwill, threadbare or secondhand, except what he gave me. “What did you lose?”
I shake my head. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s something.” The gravity of him pulls me closer. “Tell me, Jane.”
“It was a photo. I kept it at the bottom of my suitcase. Before that, I’d get a garbage bag to carry my things. So it was creased and folded and spilled on, but it was the only picture I had.” Tears gather, hot and sharp. I don’t want to cry. Definitely not in front of Beau, but they spill over anyway. It was the only picture I had, with his illegible handwriting scrawled on the back. The only semblance of a family heirloom that existed in my life. Gone.
“I’ll find it,” he says, his teeth gritted.
“Don’t.” The word comes out like an order. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
I’m talking about more than an old, bent photograph. I’m talking about us. About this strange purgatory we’re living since the fire. He understands. The knowledge sits in his dark eyes. “I’m not lying to you, Jane.”
