She pauses and spears me with a suspicious glare.
“What?” I raise my palms and laugh.
“No hazing me about the romances?”
My brow wrinkles. “Why would I haze you about that? My mom used to love reading those.”
Sympathy softens her expression. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did she pass away recently?”
My throat tightens, and I avert my gaze. “No, she’s still alive. She just doesn’t read much anymore. Alzheimer’s.”
Her hand flies out to squeeze my arm. “Oh, Rory. That must be very difficult for you.”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat as the familiar guilt picks at me.
“My mother died years ago.” Her voice is hesitant. Sad.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Were the two of you close?”
“Yes. Very. She was my best friend. When she passed, I felt like she took some of the light with her. My life definitely changed for the worse.”
“What about your dad?”
Her mouth tightens, and a dark shadow flits through her eyes. “He’s gone, too, but we were never close. He wasn’t a nice man.”
Is that when she hooked up with Leo? Maybe her parents’ deaths left her financially unstable, and she got desperate.
“That still sucks about your mother.”
“Yeah. It really does.”
I fight the temptation to pry. If I push too much, she’ll clam up. “So, that bookstore you mentioned sounds relaxing. What else do you like to do?”
Her slight shoulders tip up toward the ceiling. “I used to love painting.”
“Painting?” Unbidden, my mother’s face flashes in my mind.
Scenes from my adolescence, of wandering through labyrinthine art exhibits with my mom at the Met, play on a screen behind my eyes.
I clear my throat. “Youusedto love it?”
She nods a little, somber and shy.
“What happened?”
Silence.
When Kiara glances down, her dark brown mahogany hair falls in a curtain around her face. The urge to brush her hair back behind her ears thunders through me, probably because I’m also fighting the urge to climb onto that bed with her and get a good view of the expression she’s trying to hide.
Is she the most frustrating woman in the world? No. But she’s definitely in the top five.
Part of what unsettles me about her is her infectious personality. The more she loosens up around me, the lighter I feel.
Which annoys the fuck out of me.
She’s just a job. Nothing more.
I like the tension between us exactly where it is. When it starts to soften into something else, my paranoia spikes.
