The quiet snapped with electricity, and her heartbeat began to accelerate. “No.”
He held his powerful body still.
She couldn’t tease her guilt apart from her anger. She’d been wrong to lie, of course. Very wrong. Buthe’dbeen snooping through her cottage!
“Is it your instinct to lie whenever you’re faced with something uncomfortable?” he asked.
His words hit so close to home that defensiveness rose inside her like a flash flood. “Why is it that I have to answer to you, Sam? Why is it that you expect me to let you search the place where I live—”
“You know why I expect you to let me search this place.”
“—and you expect me to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when you haven’t told meanythingabout yourself?”
He didn’t move outwardly. Deep in his eyes, though, she sensed a fire igniting. “I want you to be honest with me,” he said with stony control, “because I think honesty will help you. Your lack of transparency is strangling you.”
“Your lack of transparency is stranglingyou!” she said vehemently, gesturing toward his farmhouse. “As far as I can tell, you’ve sequestered yourself up there so you don’t have to see or speak to anyone.”
“I’ve made peace with being alone.”
“God didn’t make any of us to be as alone as you are, Sam!”
“He did.”
“No. He didn’t.” She glared, her hands fisting. “I suspect that someone close to you has gone through drug withdrawal. And you told me that you once lost someone you loved. That’s it! We’ve had numerous conversations, and that’s all you’ve ever told me.”
“You want to know about me?” he demanded coldly.
“Yes!”
“I fell in love with a woman named Kayden once. She was beautiful and talented and young and full of life.” He threw the words at her, his features expressionless. “I brought Percocet home for us to try. She got hooked, and it dragged her down. She spent two years trying to get free of it, and I spent two years trying to save her. We both failed. I walked out. She overdosed and died.” A tendon in his neck tightened. “That’s me, Genevieve.”
All her organs seemed to slip downward as if on an escalator. What he’d been through was so shockingly awful that it rendered her instantly compassionate and instantly mortified that she’d found fault with him over his reluctance to share.
No wonderhe’d been hesitant to open up. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to rent this cottage to her. No wonder he’d demanded to search this place at will.
She was a painful reminder of the woman he’d lost.
He bent and picked up his hat from the love seat. Rolling it in the fingers of one hand, he moved toward the door. “You asked me earlier why you have to answer to me. Other than following through on the things we agreed on when I said that you could stay here, you don’t have to answer to me. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. I don’t want to get wrapped up in this.”
“I...”
He hesitated on the threshold, holding the door half open. “So long as you do the things you said you’d do when you moved in, that’s all I need from you.”
“Sam—” She hurried to the doorway, but he didn’t look back. Shivering with the force of her emotions, gnawing on her bottom lip, she watched him go. Recriminations formed a cyclone within.
Convincing Sam to befriend her had been like convincing a wolf to eat from her hand. In losing her temper, what had she done?Had she just ruined all the headway they’d made? Their relationship was more valuable to her than gold.
She closed the door, sat heavily on the edge of her bed, and burst into tears.
The north wind blew against Sam as his strides ate the distance between Gen’s guesthouse and his farmhouse.
Fury roiled inside him.
Hadn’t he shown Gen that she could count on him? Why, then, had she lied to him instead of simply telling him the truth? He couldn’t stand it when people lied to him.
His memory swam back in time. He’d texted Kayden one day to ask what her lunch plans were, very similar to the way he’d checked on Gen today.
I’m planning to work through lunch at my desk. XO XO, she’d texted back.
