“YOUR MOTHER IS SWEET,” SAID Sophie when Emerson walked back into the kitchen.
Her back was to him as she bent over to put her chili bowl into the dishwasher, giving him a spectacular view of her denim-clad ass. Heart-shaped with hips just wide enough to rest his hands on and legs that seemed to go on forever. Her feet were bare against the cold tile and the cherry-red polish on her toenails stood in stark contrast to his gray floor. He had a brief vision of what it would be like to have her pretty, slender feet rest on his shoulder, but he squashed the image before he embarrassed himself.
Maybe it was her age—hell, maybe it was his—but being around Sophie made him feel like a randy teenager. He thought about sex at the most inappropriate times.All the time actually.It was a constant balance trying to manage his blood flow so he had enough left to think with. It also made him feel uncharacteristically out of control.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, and the look in her eyes made him wonder if she could read his thoughts. “Your mom filled your already full refrigerator. The chili is awesome.”
He clenched his jaw, willing away the inappropriate images making him misread Sophie’s intentions. He’d been fighting the urge to devour her, and she’d been offering him chili. He was losing his mind.
“I’m okay. Thanks.” He wasn’t, but he’d had lunch. He wasn’t hungry for food. “I hope she didn’t interrupt your work too much. My asshole brother must have called her.”
Her face clouded for a moment, and he kicked himself for being insensitive. He was supposed to take care of Sophie and instead he’d spent his time picturing her naked and implied he didn’t want his mother to meet her. God, he was the asshole, not Gabe.
“I didn’t mean...”
“No, it’s okay. She’s fantastic. I had a really nice time with her. I’ll have to remember to thank Gabe the next time I see him.”
Ouch.
He had a feeling any explanation he offered would only make things worse, and he still had a bunch of uncomfortable questions to ask her.
“Could we sit down for a couple of minutes? Do you have time?” he asked, trying to give her as much of a choice as he could.
She nodded, and he followed her to the sofa, sitting beside her on the worn leather instead of taking the opposite chair. After seeing how warm and open she and his mother had been with each other, he had an irrational urge to be close to her.
“What’s up?” She shifted to face him, tucking her feet with their distracting pedicure underneath her.
“We’ve hit a bit of a wall.” He was going to tell her the truth and try not to scare her at the same time, which he had a feeling would be harder than his blood balancing routine. “I’ve dug into both of the attacks—the robbery and the shooting—and the only thing I can find in common is you. I’m out of obvious leads and with the situation with Rainier, things seem to be escalating.” He called it a situation instead of torture and murder, but from the expression on her face, he didn’t think she was fooled. “You said you don’t know why someone would want to attack you.” She opened her mouth, and he held up his hand to stop her. “I believe you. I do. But I still need to figure out the reason so I can eliminate the threat.”
“You came here from Australia, but you’ve got dual citizenship with the United States.” He ticked off the things he knew, hoping if he laid out what he found he could get her to talk to him.
“I was born in the States, but my mother took my brother and I back to Broome before my first birthday. I don’t remember any of it.”
She wouldn’t. He’d found her birth certificate and a record of her leaving the country at seven months old with her mother and brother. There was no record of her father and the trail he’d found disappeared once the small family got back to Australia. He could send a man there or go himself, but until he had some idea of what he was looking for, it felt like wasted energy.
“What happened to make you leave Australia?” He waited and when she still didn’t answer, he reached out to touch her knee.
It was an innocent touch that felt anything but. She met and held his gaze, her blue eyes burning into him the way her skin burned him through the denim. Watching her, he paused, simply letting his hand rest on her leg. If he’d gotten any indication she didn’t want his touch, he would have stood immediately and moved to the chair, but it felt like just the opposite. Like if he wanted barriers between them, he was going to have to be the one to erect them.
He wanted to touch her, but it was more than that. The way his mother talked to him and the way Sophie had shied away from talking about her past before, he had a feeling it wasn’t something she wanted to relive. He couldn’t protect her from that, but he could will her to take some of her strength from him. He could stay with her and make sure she knew he was there, right beside her. And he could keep everything else he was feeling to himself.
“My mother, my brother, and I lived on a pearl farm near Water Bank. My mum didn’t dive. She graded pearls and handled some of the sales to the local places in Broome. Just to the touristy shops, nothing major. Noah, my brother, dove a bit, but he never had much interest in the beds, and I was too young to do anything but help my mum. She taught me everything I know about pearls.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “She died when I was fifteen. Pancreatic cancer.”
It took a Herculean effort for him to keep his hand still, not to squeeze her leg or pull her into his arms. He couldn’t imagine losing his mother at any age but especially not that young. He remembered his sisters as teenagers. Sophie would have been just a girl. Just getting to the part where she really needed her mother.
“Noah turned eighteen right before my mother passed. He took care of both of us.” She smiled when she said the words, and he could feel the love she had for her brother.
He didn’t have any trouble imagining what it would be like to be responsible for his sisters. Hell, even for Gabe. And he didn’t have any doubt how badly he would have messed it up at eighteen. Emerson wasn’t sure he wanted to know what came next. With the way Sophie clearly felt about Noah, something must have happened to keep her from reaching out to her brother when she got in trouble.
He moved his palm from her knee to reach for her hand, grateful when she twined her fingers with his in acceptance of his touch. He didn’t know how to comfort her, but he knew he wanted to try. Running his thumb back and forth over the pulse point at her wrist, he waited for her to keep talking.
“He did the best he could. I’d have been lost without him, awkward tampon purchases aside and the fact that he scared off every boy who got close to me. We had a little bit of money left from Mum and a tiny two room house. Noah was supposed to go to university, but he put it off for a year and then another. In the end, he waited until I was a senior to apply. He died in a car accident a year later.”
The set of her jaw was the only indication of how much it cost her to share the story with him.
“Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”Stupid, ineffective words. He wanted to take her pain away, to hold her and tell her he’d do everything he could to make sure she didn’t get hurt again.
“There wasn’t anything left there for me, so I moved on.” She shrugged as if it were the most natural thing in the world for an eighteen-year-old girl to set off on her own with no family to help her.
