Chapter Fourteen #2
But he sobered all too quickly. “You want to call this a one-off, draw that line between us … well, that’s your choice. I can’t promise to be very noble about it, but it’s your choice.”
“Noble is who you are, Nate,” she muttered reflexively, because it was just true. It was the heart of him. And since it was, she figured she couldn’t keep pulling at threads, hoping they’d unravel now rather than later. “I guess the real option is just seeing where this goes.”
“You guess,” he replied, and she could hear the eye roll in his tone, so she glared at him.
“Yeah, what do you guess?”
But he was smiling at her. “That seeing where it goes sounds good.” Then he leaned forward, took her face in his hands, and pressed his mouth to hers.
No half-assed kiss. No half-assed anything from Nate. She wanted to sink into this, to just accept they were seeing where it goes.
But it was going to go to places neither one of them wanted to admit, if they let it. She wrapped her hands around his wrists, pulled back from his mouth. Just a little.
She couldn’t help but think about last night, about how he couldn’t seem to stomach the thought she might see his leg. Which meant either he’d had a bad experience with someone after he’d gotten hurt, or… “You … haven’t been with anyone since you got hurt?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Nope.”
It put a bigger weight on things, so she didn’t know why she’d had to ask. “So I’m just special.”
He met her gaze, that direct brown that was always a precursor to a dagger to the heart. “You are.”
She scowled at him, dropping his hands and pulling away completely, refusing to rub at the ache in her chest. “You know you use that direct honesty like a weapon?”
“Yeah. I know. I’m going to keep being direct, Sam. I’m not playing mind games. I’m not going to up and disappear one day. If I have a problem, I’m going to let you know. So you’re going to have to work on giving me the same courtesy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can hear you thinking sometimes. When you want to hide whatever it is you’re afraid to want or tell me or deal with.
I get it. You’re used to depending on yourself, and that’s no easy habit to break.
I am too. I won’t be perfect at it, but I’m going into this with open eyes and the determination to try. ”
Try. Her heart twisted.
“I know you’ve got some soft spots. I’m not the kind of guy who goes in for the kill on soft spots. Something hurts, something doesn’t work, you can tell me. You can trust me.”
She wanted to look away. She wanted to be a coward. But he was so brave, she didn’t feel right taking the coward’s way out. “I do.”
“You don’t sound happy about that.”
She couldn’t quite meet his gaze for this part. She looked down at the crumbs on her plate, moved them around with her fork. “Trusting people has gotten me a whole lot of hurt.”
“I can’t promise not to hurt you, Sam.” His hand smoothed over her hair, curled around the back of her neck. “But I don’t want to.”
“Well, I guess I don’t want to hurt you either. And that’s kind of my MO.”
He sighed. “I don’t think that’s fair to say about yourself. It’s not your fault your aunt was hurt because you told the truth. It was an important truth, Sam.”
She just … didn’t know how to believe that, no matter how many times he said it. If love and loyalty were necessary parts of any relationship, what did it mean if you always betrayed both?
“Sam.” He gave her neck a little squeeze until she sighed and looked at him. “I know better than most just how complicated life can be. It’ll take more than you pissing me off to get me to bail. I figure you’ll piss me off most days.”
She snorted out a laugh in spite of herself. Well, at least he didn’t have unrealistic expectations.
“I can take it. Taken a lot worse.”
“I don’t want to be your worse.” Too honest.
Too much. But it was just the basic truth of what worried her about all this.
Maybe in the beginning, when she’d first brought him back to Marietta, she figured she was a little more with it than Nate.
He’d been hurt in war, living in some creepy loner cabin on a mountain in the middle of nowhere Tennessee all by himself.
She’d had a real job, a real goal. Then she’d found out about her father, and as Nate had been rebuilding his life, hers seemed to be falling apart.
“You said you trust me, Sam. And I’m telling you you’re not anybody’s worse.”
She nodded, trying to believe it. Maybe she’d get there, maybe she never would, but when he kissed her, she figured it didn’t matter. She could just … enjoy this and him and whatever.
So, she let him deepen the kiss. Let it all spin out. Let physical pleasure blot out all the nasty whispers in her brain.
They could see where it went. They’d survive. They’d survived worse than each other, and maybe she didn’t want them to be each other’s worsts, but hey, their dads were murderers.
Could it get worse than that?
She really hoped that wasn’t tempting fate.
*
The trill of the phone in Nate’s pocket surprised them both enough to jerk away from the tangle of each other. Sam groaned. Nate considered throwing the phone out into the snow. But he just didn’t get a lot of phone calls that weren’t important.
And since the past twelve hours had been pretty damn nice, he figured it was bad news. He pulled the phone out of his pocket, his free arm still locked around Sam’s waist.
He read the display. “Cal.”
“Does he have a damn radar?” Sam grumbled, causing Nate to smile in spite of himself.
“Knowing Cal, probably. But I should take it.”
“Yeah, you should.” She extricated herself from his hold, adjusted her rumpled clothing, and started collecting dishes from the table and taking them to the sink as Nate answered the call.
“Everything okay at the ranch?” Nate asked.
“Yeah, at the ranch,” Cal said. He sounded … wound up. “Nate. Jesus. We need to talk.”
“I’m not really looking to go out driving in this.” Or leaving Sam’s apartment for the foreseeable future. “Is it important?”
“No, it’s about a football game on Sunday. Of course it’s fucking important.”
Nate sighed, closing his eyes. “What happened?”
“I just had … I can’t even…”
“Cal, spit it out. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t even know. Aly and I went up to the Harrington cabin to help them dig out. Apparently that asshole detective was there yesterday and questioned Glenda. Without Jill in the room.”
Nate didn’t like the idea of that—but he never liked the idea of Detective Hayes.
Something about the guy … but he couldn’t work out exactly what because most of what he didn’t like about Jake Hayes had to do with his interest in Sam.
“About Glenda’s statement?” That didn’t have to be dire. Or bad. It could just mean…
“No, apparently not. Apparently about that guy Sam’s investigating.”
For a moment, Nate’s mind went completely blank. Because why would Hayes know about Bo? Why would Glenda know about Bo?
“You mean…” Nate looked over at Sam.
He didn’t want to say the name Bo Lake in front of her right now. Because he knew he’d talked a good game before Cal’s phone call, but Bo connecting to things was going to … complicate it all.
You knew this was going to be complicated going in.
“Yeah, the guy that looks like us that you think is Dad’s long-lost kid or whatever the hell. Why does Hayes know about that? Why does Glenda have anything to do with that?”
Hell if Nate knew, but what he did know was this was about to make what should be a pleasant day … complicated.
Bo Lake complicated every damn thing.
“Listen, Nate. That’s only the surface. Glenda wouldn’t tell Jill anything the detective asked, so Jill and Aly get it in their heads she’ll talk to me. So she did.”
“Like … talked talk?”
“No. She wrote it out. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Listen.” Cal was starting to sound more …
clear. More determined, less freaked out.
“That detective is poking around that guy that looks like us, and thinks Glenda knows something about it. Glenda, who has done nothing but help us no matter how fucking cryptically, thinks he needs to be far away from here. That’s what she wrote down.
You need to get him far away from here. We need to make that happen.
You and me. You can’t tell anyone else. Let’s not complicate it.
Let’s just find a way to get him to leave. ”
Nate looked at Sam cleaning up after breakfast wearing slouchy sweats with her hair sex-tousled from last night. How they’d just had this whole conversation about being direct and seeing where this goes.
Could he really turn around not five minutes later and lie? Maybe he should. Maybe that would be easier.
But he couldn’t. “I’ve got to tell Sam.”
Hearing her name, she looked over her shoulder at him, concern written into her expression.
“You think she’s going to let you kick one of her cases to the curb? Because I don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. Look, if you want to keep this from Landon and Aly, that’s your choice for right now because you’re the one there dealing with them. But … where have secrets gotten us, Cal?”
“Where has the truth gotten us, Nate?”
Nate sighed, rubbing a hand over his hair. “I’m going to tell her. She has to know. And we’ll decide how to move forward from there.”
“You’ll regret it.”
“Maybe,” Nate agreed. “Maybe I will, but I’m doing it. And I’ll handle … him. You leave this to me, okay?”
“Glenda talked to me.”
“And you’re calling me. So let me handle it.”
Cal was silent so long Nate worried he’d ended the connection. Not that what he eventually said made Nate feel any better.
“We’ll see,” Call muttered, then hung up on him.
Nate kept the phone to his ear for a minute, trying to get his head on straight. Trying to figure out what to say, how to broach this.
You could just not tell her… It didn’t have to be in opposition to what they’d just talked about. Direct didn’t mean telling every truth. Keeping her out of this didn’t change anything he’d said or meant.
He finally put down the phone, shoved it in his pocket. When he managed to turn to face her, she was standing in her kitchenette wringing a dishtowel in her hands. “That sounded … tense.”
Nate didn’t know how to wade through all the tense. And he knew looking at her, that wariness in her expression, as much as he wanted to keep this from her, keep this complication away from them, it would blow up in his face if he took the coward’s way out right now.
If he and Sam were going to be at odds over this, he couldn’t fix that. But he could make sure everything they’d started last night stayed intact while they disagreed.
So, he went with direct. Direct worked. Direct could hurt, but it didn’t … confuse. “Detective Hayes went and talked to Glenda yesterday.”
“About her statement?”
“About the man you’re investigating.”
Sam’s eyebrows drew together. “Bo?”
“Apparently. She wouldn’t tell that to Jill. But today…” He took a few steps closer to the kitchen, not liking all this distance between them. “She told Cal we need to keep him far away from here.”