Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(108)

The warmth of her hand, the warmth in her eyes, helped steady his breathing. Again he felt the urge, the need, to pour himself out to her. I’m innocent! It would be a kind of anguished cry, an insistence bigger than the words. I’m innocent, and I need you and everyone in the whole world to know and see.…

Help me. Help me tell them.

And maybe she would. If there was anyone in the world who would, it was Nora.

“It’s fine. I know what you meant. Go on.”

Her voice, so quiet and even. Free of judgment. She wasn’t disturbed by his situation, but she might be turned off by his desperation.

And he’d been stoic so long, he wasn’t sure what would happen if he stopped. He’d made a science out of the stoicism, knew exactly how to wrap his arms around all the pieces and hold them together. The thing inside him—it had the feel of a genie in a corked bottle, all unintended consequences and wishes for things you could only approach, could never have. Weren’t fairy tales full of those kinds of stories? I want her to know what I’m thinking. Feeling. Only no one did, really. No one wanted to be that kind of naked and exposed.

He swallowed it—the bigness of what he desperately wanted to say—and went on with his story, more careful this time to listen to his own words. He wouldn’t say something like that again. Something that might make her doubt him. I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money. Jesus.

“It didn’t feel like the right thing for me to be doing, taking people’s money and using it to grow this big business, this too-big-to-fail bank. I didn’t hate it—I loved the thrill of it, convincing people to take my word for where their money would work hardest for them. But I had this sense that the ends didn’t justify the means. And then one of my customers started asking me about investing in some ‘do-good’ companies and nonprofits and so on, and things started to take shape in my mind. I went back to school, got a nonprofit management degree, started my organization, and the rest is more or less history.”

“So it didn’t start with some huge philanthropic vision. You kind of found the philanthropy.”

“It found me.”

“You love it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re good at it?”

He could only nod. Several months before the investigation had opened, his organization had appeared on a national list of the best-run charitable organizations. He remembered thinking, This is the beginning. Everything good from here on out. His alma mater, Yale, had contacted him about an interview for the alumni magazine, a short feature on his organization and him. After news had broken about the investigation, the magazine editor had called him back to put the project “on hold.”

Even if he was acquitted, the Internet would never be sponged free of links between his name and the crime. The stain would follow him, and it would corrupt Nora, too, if she stayed in his life. She wouldn’t lose her job, but she might have trouble finding subsequent ones, because there would be guilt-by-association issues. Especially if they combined their finances. If they—

Had he been about to let himself think that? If they got married.

Fifteen minutes at the party plus four phone calls plus one day was still only a day of knowing her. It was just the way she’d occupied his mind for months, just the wanting, that made it feel like longer.

The waitress came and cleared their plates. “Can I leave dessert menus with you?”

He raised an eyebrow at Nora, and she nodded vehemently. He laughed, and the cloud lifted for a moment. Over and over she made him feel as if things were somehow, improbably, going to be okay, the kind of okay her whole world seemed to be made of.

He wanted to believe in it. He desperately did.

“Miles?” she asked, when the waitress was gone.

“Yeah?”

“Can we make another date? Like, for another weekend? You could come to Boston.”

“Of course,” he said.

“And if money’s an issue … You said—”

“We’ll make it work.”

But, despite his certainty, his heart beat against his ribs like something trying to escape, and he wanted to hold his hands there to keep it where it belonged. So many things he didn’t know: where the money would come from, how they would handle the thousand miles between them, how she would react if he was charged with embezzlement, if the case went to trial, if he was found guilty, if he went to jail…

She was gazing across the table at him with such earnestness, such openness, that it made his chest hurt. Shocking that a woman whose boyfriend had slept with another woman for nine months without telling her could still have that kind of willingness to open herself up.

He didn’t understand how she did it, how she could stand to be out there so far, on a limb, all her feelings raw like they were. He wanted to crawl back inside himself and zip up.

“Miles.” She put her hand over his. “Don’t panic. It’s just another date.”

“I think we’re past ‘just.’ I think we flew past ‘just’ sometime shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve.”

She laughed. “You may be right.”

“I’m not panicking the way you think. I’m not panicking about us. I’m panicking about me. I don’t know anything. Nora, I don’t know anything.”