Her mother had needed her father like that, had built her whole identity around him being there. And when he left, she’d shattered into so many pieces that twelve-year-old Gina had spent the next six years trying to glue them back together.
Gina had sworn she’d never need anyone that way, would never give another person the power to destroy her by leaving.
And here she was, one day in, and already feeling the hooks of need settling into her chest. Already starting to plan around him, wondering about him, needing to know he was okay.
How well did she really know Nick? If Kelsey could betray them after two years of friendship, what did that say abouttrusting Nick after one day? A man who might leave tomorrow because that’s what men like him did. They left. They always left.
The answer should’ve been easy.Yes. Of course, yes.She’d felt his integrity in every action today, tasted it in his kiss, seen it in the way he took care of people without needing credit.
But saying yes meant admitting she needed him. Meant giving him the power to hurt her. Meant risking everything she’d built to protect herself.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly.
The words seemed to hit Nick like a physical blow. His face went pale, and she saw something die in his eyes. Not anger. Worse—understanding, like he’d been waiting for this, expecting it.
“Gina,” he said, and the way he said her name made her chest ache.
She couldn’t do this. Couldn’t stand there and watch him look at her like she was ruining something. So she did what she always did when things got too complicated, too real.
She stepped back and put distance between them.
“I don’t know you,” she repeated and heard her voice go cold, clinical. The nurse voice. The one that kept everything at arm’s length. “We met this morning. One day, Nick. That’s all this is. One day of crisis that made everything feel more intense than it actually was.”
“You don’t believe that.” His voice was quiet but certain.
He was right. She didn’t believe it. But she needed it to be true, needed the kiss to be just adrenaline, needed whatever was building between them to be situational instead of real.
Because if it were real, she was already in too deep to survive him leaving.
“I don’t know you,” she said again, stepping farther away. “I don’t know any of you. Apparently, I don’t know anything.”
The betrayal she felt wasn’t just about Kelsey anymore. It was about her own stupidity, her willingness to trust and care and hope when she should’ve known better. When shedidknow better.
And it was about the terror of how much she had already started to need him, how the thought of him leaving made her chest tight and her breathing shallow and her carefully controlled life feel suddenly, desperately insufficient.
George was right about one thing: everyone had a price. And apparently, hers was the fantasy that she could let someone in without getting destroyed when they left.
She couldn’t look at Nick’s face, couldn’t see what her words had done to him. Because if she looked, she might take it back, might admit that pushing him away hurt worse than any betrayal Kelsey could’ve managed.
She might admit that she was terrified, not because she didn’t trust Nick, but because she was already starting to need him. And need was the one thing she’d sworn she’d never feel again.
Chapter 12
Nick
The silence after Gina’s words stretched long enough that Nick could hear his own heartbeat over the wind outside. “I don’t know you,” she’d said, and the truth of it cut deeper than it should have.
She was right, of course. They’d only known each other for a matter of hours. What had he been thinking, imagining there could be something real between them?
“Well...” George said, breaking the silence. “Now that we have that sorted out, let’s talk about next steps.”
“What next steps?” Brooke asked.
George pointed at Kelsey. “We’ve got a conundrum here. This was supposed to be a simple pickup. But Little Miss Hoity-Toity decided to play games and make this last drop up here at the edge of nowhere, where the weather does whatever it wants to do. My employers are going to want to know why the pickup was delayed. They don’t like complications.”
“Then leave,” Joe said as he turned to Kelsey. “Give him the flash drive. He’ll go, and we’ll all be done with this.”
“A brilliant idea.” George glanced toward the boarded-up windows, as if he could gauge the weather beyond them. “Maybe the storm’s letting up, but that road will be a mess for hours. And now I have five people who can identify me, who know about this drop and every other one, who’ve already heard far too much about my business.”
