“THAT’S BECAUSE I don’t.” Of all the things she’d expected him to sayyou own a pearl farmwas nowhere on the list. “I don’t.”
“How would I know? I’ve had to coax every bit of information you’ve ever told me from you. You haven’t volunteered a damn thing.”
He was angry, but she was angrier. She’d tried to be honest with him. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t laid her life story out for him, but she didn’t do that for anyone. Her past and her pain weren’t for voyeuristic consumption. As she had the thought, she realized that was wrong. Emerson hadn’t been looking for gratuitous intimacy. He’d asked her because he needed to know, but that did little to mitigate her hurt or her anger.
“I don’t share my past with anyone. With the exception of my brother and my mother, you know more about me than anyone else ever has. I’ve never lied to you. I may not have told you everything. Not like you’d expect from someone in a relationship, but that was never what we were doing anyway, right?” She waited, hoping he’d call her bluff, needing him to tell her she was wrong. That even with it’s weird start, this thing between them had grown into a relationship. She wanted him to tell her that he believed her and they were so much more than where they started.
“The farm belonged to your mother. It passed from her first to your brother and then to you. When your name showed up on Seaton’s website, someone in Australia must have seen and realized you were alive and still had a valid claim on the beds.”
“They’ll never let it go, will they? I’m never going to be safe?”
“I’ll fix it. Don’t worry,” he said but there was no reassurance in his voice. His jaw was clenched and his expression so hard she wrapped her arms tighter around her. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me? Anything that could help me do my job?”
Because that’s what she was to him.Another part of his job. Not his lover or even his friend. Just one more obligation for Emerson to carry.
“No, nothing.”
“Don’t wait for me for dinner. I’ve got work to do.”
He turned away and just like that, he was gone, leaving her with a chill she didn’t think she’d ever be rid of.
The water was still warm when she stepped into the tub, but she added hot water anyway, filling it until it reached her chin. She tried to soak away the cold that seeped into her as soon as Emerson started talking, but her mind kept getting caught and circling around his words. The farm belonged to her mother. Noah owned it after that. Now it belonged to her, which didn’t matter because a crime cartel was trying to kill her to retain control. Except who would get it after her? She didn’t have any other relatives. None that she knew of anyway. After what she just learned, she didn’t trust anything she thought she knew.
She searched her memories, looking for anything she might have missed. Any tip-off that the farm belonged to her mother. She’d never have guessed it at the time, but in hind sight there were things that should have made her wonder. The money they had after her mother passed. The fact that they could stay in the house she grew up in. Looking back, none of that should have been possible.
She never thought to question it at the time. She and Noah were too busy trying to survive. She couldn’t bring herself to think about whether Noah knew or not. She didn’t trust herself with the answer, with what it might mean if he’d kept the information from her.
Emerson wasn’t back before the water cooled. She didn’t know what she’d say to him anyway. He’d put his body between her and a bullet, and then he’d turned her world upside down. He’d held her like she was the most precious thing in the world and then he’d walked out the door, convinced she was lying to him. It was all too much for one evening.
She didn’t bother with dinner. She’d lost her appetite to the questions swirling in her head. Sleep would be easier. She paused with her hand hovering over the door knob for the guest room. They’d been sleeping together in Emerson’s room. Opening the door, she stepped into the room, the unused bed as big as a marquee in the middle of the room. If she climbed into the bed, she wasn’t sure they’d ever find their way back to each other. She wasn’t sure if they’d found each other to begin with or if they’d just been marking time until all of this was over.
Her gaze landed on the box holding Amanda’s jewelry and her heart clenched. She and Emerson might be done, but she wasn’t going to be the one who closed the door on them. Stopping long enough to set the velvet-lined box on the empty hall table, she continued to Emerson’s room and climbed into the bed they’d been sharing. The bed that started out smelling like him and now smelled like the two of them together. Burying herself under the comforter, she curled into a ball and drifted off to sleep.
––––––––
EMERSON SCROLLED THROUGHsatellite images of the pearl farm and tried to ignore the empty ache in his heart. He hadn’t gone to his apartment to pick a fight with Sophie. He believed her when she said she didn’t know about the farm. Gabe was right. If she’d thought she was supposed to be hiding, she wouldn’t have used her real name and she sure as hell wouldn’t have let Seaton use her name in their promotional materials.
Gabe was right about other things too, although there was no way in hell Emerson was going to tell him that. He cared about Sophie as much more than a client or even a friend, and everybody lies. He’d lied about his feelings—first to himself and then to her. When she said they weren’t in a relationship, he should have been man enough to tell her the truth. To tell her that this thing between them had gone much further than he’d ever intended. That she meant so much more to him.
He kept replaying things in his head. He understood why Sophie had secrets. He’d watched her relive her past over the last few days. He’d seen how much it cost her. If she didn’t share her past, it was because she had reasons. She’d had to deal with the kind of loss he could only imagine. All along, he’d been assuming she was innocent, inexperienced. In reality, she was the stronger of the two of them. At eighteen—hell fifteen—he honestly didn’t know if he’d have been able to handle things as well as she had. He underestimated her again.
Closing out the tab with the photos, he tried to move on to the next item on his unending to-do list, but he couldn’t focus on the spreadsheet in front of him. He couldn’t think about anything but the woman waiting for him upstairs. The work would wait. It was always there. He didn’t know if the same was true of Sophie. He gave his email a quick scan to make sure there wasn’t anything that would fall apart before the morning. The real estate agent was showing the office space and had given him a courtesy heads-up, and the investment firm had upped the security requirements for its event at the end of the month. He replied to both and forwarded the details to Gabe. The rest could wait until tomorrow.
Andrews looked up from his monitor and nodded as Emerson went by. He’d have to ask Gabe what the kid did to get stuck with the night shift two weeks in a row, but he was pretty sure there was some kind of bet involved. On second thought, maybe he didn’t want to know. He sent Perez a quick text letting him know he was on his way up as he stepped into the elevator and hit the button for his floor. If the realtor managed to rent the second-floor offices, he was going to have to think about putting code access for each floor on the elevator. They had it in the parking garage and the other public access points but the last thing he needed was some data entry clerk wandering into the Southerland Security offices. Figuring that out could wait until tomorrow too.
“Night, boss.” Perez nodded to him as he keyed in the code for the front door.
The apartment was dark. After the way they left things, he hadn’t really expected Sophie to wait up for him. Seeing how empty the space felt hammered home how much he’d gotten used to having her there waiting for him, her energy filling his space. He glanced over to her makeshift workspace on his kitchen table, and his stomach dropped. The table was empty, the way it had been before she moved in.
He knew she was still there. She couldn’t get past Perez without him knowing and his logical mind didn’t think she’d try. As far as he’d seen, she wasn’t afraid of much, but she also didn’t take unnecessary chances. She knew the kind of danger she was in; she wouldn’t run off. But she could, and she wouldn’t be in danger forever. He didn’t know exactly how yet, but he’d figure out a way to make Sophie safe and then she’d go back to her life and he’d go back to his empty apartment and maybe the occasional late-nightArrangementmatch. Assuming she’d want even that much contact after he’d been such a chicken shit.
Feeling like an ass, which was becoming an increasingly familiar feeling, he turned and the box on the counter caught his eye. He stared at it for a moment as if it were some kind of bomb that might go off before he undid the small metal clasp and raised the lid.
Amanda’s necklace nestled on the velvet lining, the intricate pearl flowers wound together in an oval. It was as if Sophie had figured out how to dip a delicate flowering vine in silver and luster in a way that made it so much more than it had been before she touched it. It was the same thing she’d done to him: made him more than he was before her touch.
It was beautiful, natural, sophisticated, the whole so much more than the parts. His sister was going to love it. It also felt like an ending, like one less link between him and Sophie. Closing the lid on the box, he started down the hall to the master bedroom almost stumbling when he saw the door to the guest bedroom was cracked.What if it was already over?What if she’d decided to cut her loses and leave his bed? He pushed the door open, exhaling when he found the room empty.
The band around his chest relaxed when he opened the door to his bedroom and saw Sophie curled into a ball in the middle. It was as if without him there to wrap around, she’d turned in on herself. Stripping off his clothes, he slipped under the covers and gathered her into his arms. She whimpered in her sleep and he held her tighter, wrapping his body around her in an attempt to shelter her from whatever tormented her.
