“My heart isn’t in it. I can’t keep lying. It’s not right.”
My gaze dropped to the floor. He was right. It had been bad enough to lie to Grandmother today, but it was all kinds of wrong to lie to her for an entire summer.
But I needed my inheritance. And on a deeper level I desperately wanted to keep from being shut out of her life again. I hadn’t known how much I needed that until I’d heard her say that she cared about me.
As far as my dad’s side of the family went, I’d spent my childhood on the outside looking in. Being on her good side was all new to me, and I didn’t want to lose that. Lying was horrible, but I wasn’t going to do it for the rest of my life. I just had to lie long enough to be able to lie my way out of my lie.
Okay, my head spun a little at my own dizzying logic, but it made sense to me… I thought.
I gulped, knowing I had to come clean to him. I hated making myself vulnerable; dating a long line of fungus-headed ne’er-do-wells will do that to a gal. But I had no other option. I could either expose my heart or watch my relationship with Grandmother crash and burn.
“I’ll lose her, Cash.”
“You mean she’ll take her money back.”
I looked him in the eyes. “No, I’ll lose her. I’ve never had a relationship with her before. She never wanted one.”
“And what makes you think the truth would be so bad?”
“If she finds out what I tried to do today it’ll wreck everything. You heard what she said about dishonesty. It’s a dealbreaker for her. Everything will go back to the way things were. Icy. Lonely. I can’t let her see the real me—not all at once, at least.”
His arms relaxed and fell to his sides. “Hey, the person you’ve always been is pretty awesome.”
I rolled my eyes and whispered a scoffing chuckle. “And you know that how?”
“You’re real, Willow. That’s what I’ve always admired about you. I pretend to be someone I’m not every day, and that’s nothing to be proud of.”
“What about the whole ‘what you see is what you get’ thing?”
“I’m real about what I believe and who I love. But the charming ladies’ man who knows all the right things to say and do? No, there’s nothing to admire about him.”
“So, you’re saying that the Cash Walker I’ve seen almost every day for the past two years was all a fake?”
“I haven’t always faked it with you.”
The tips of his ears turned red, and my pulse raced. This wasn’t the direction I saw a conversation with Cash going… ever.
“I wasn’t faking it when I pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road to come back to that gas station and give you a jump. And I wasn’t faking when I came over and fixed the lock on your door when the super was dragging his feet.”
Okay, so, therehadbeen a few instances over the past twenty-four months when Cash had been tolerable. If I was going to be fair, there had been a few times he’d actually been a pretty great guy. But I’d shielded my heart with the emotional equivalent of barbed wire, electrified fencing, and a moat filled with hungry alligators. I hadn’t allowed myself to admit that a guy could be kind for kindness’s sake.
“Why do you put on the act, then?”
“That’s not important right now,” he said. “What is important is the fact that you’re not a fake.” He took a step closer. “You’re the real deal, Willow. When other women were fake as all get out, I could always count on you to be true to who you were, no matter what kind of shenanigans I pulled. I hate to see you cheapen that with lies. I can’t be a part of it.”
He was a deep thinker. Under normal circumstances, I’d love that. But these were far from normal circumstances.
I totally understood his moral qualms about what I was asking him to do. But the haggler in me had to try one more time. “I don’t suppose giving you the full fifteen grand you wanted in the first place would change your mind?”
“No, just give me the thirteen you promised, and we’ll call it a day.”
I froze. Being a person accustomed to living on the low-end of the earning spectrum, I was no stranger to falling short when it was time to pay the bills. But I’d never found myself quite so short as I was today. I was twelve thousand, nine hundred and seventy dollars short, to be exact.
“Well, here’s the funny part. Now, it might not sound all that funny today, but one day, I’m sure we’re both going to look back on this day and laugh.”
“Your granny didn’t give you the money yet, did she?”
“Not yet.”
