Gabe fiddled with his pen. “Hmm.”
She roused herself and grabbed the sunscreen. “Would you like some?”
“I don’t really burn.”
“Neither do I, but it’s good to protect your skin anyway.”
He made a face, but he accepted the lotion. She couldn’t help but stare as he rubbed the lotion into his arms. His biceps flexed. The sun had already kissed his skin a shade darker.
Her eyes narrowed as she stared at that skin. The puzzle pieces all slowly clicked into place, leaving a hunch that was almost too ridiculous to believe.
Getting involved with a Chandler would be messy.
Anyone could say that, for any number of reasons. Granted, her parentage had traditionally been the reason men wanted to get involved with her, but she could see how, in Rockville, some people might be wary of her name.
But the rest of it...
Robert makes everything messy.
For Livvy and Nicholas, Robert Kane made things messy. If she’d ever gotten involved with Jackson, same. Robert Kane was a very specific wedge between the Kanes and the Chandlers.
But not between the Chandlers and anyone else.
So the one possibility was that she’d misunderstood, and he’d been talking about another Robert completely. Or that she hadn’t misunderstood.
And getting involved with a Chandler was messy because he was a...
“How old were you when you were adopted?”
His eyebrows raised at her sudden question. He answered anyway. “Three.”
“Were your parents looking to adopt?”
If she hadn’t been staring at him, she would have missed how the skin around his eyes tightened. “That’s how it always goes, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose. Or sometimes there’s other circumstances.”
He placed his tablet on the chair, his pen on top of it. “Like what?”
Like paternity and secrets and cover-ups. “Do you know anything about your birth parents?”
He blinked once. “No.”
He was lying. And there weren’t many reasons for him to lie.
Had she thought him uncomplicated and simple?
She closed her eyes and opened them, and in the space of a few minutes, Gabe transformed from a beautiful, unattainable man to a breathing, three-dimensional human who had issues and problems and family drama of his own.
Her gaze drifted over his arms. The sleeves were made up of various elements—flowers, a steampunk clock and gears, trees, a sword.
As beautiful as it was as a whole, her gaze didn’t linger on any of that. No, it was the top of his right shoulder which caught her attention, a geometric design that had been worked so seamlessly into the rest of the sleeve it was barely visible on its own, except for the black ink arching over his shoulder.
She’d seen that design before. “Your sleeves. Did you design them yourself?”
“Yeah.” He touched his right arm. “I got this one first, then the other.”
“What do they mean?”
