Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(109)

“You don’t have to know anything,” she said. “You only have to—it’s a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing.”

One foot in front of the other. Just another date.

He could do this. He wanted to do this. For her. With her.

He turned his hand over and squeezed hers tight. “What are you doing next weekend?” In the wide-openness of her expression, something softened further, and he felt an echo in his chest.

“Hanging with you.” Within the cup of his hand, the smooth back of hers slid along his palm, a caress. A suggestion.

He almost couldn’t bear it—not her touch, not the sense of release her expression had provoked in him, not the answering rebound of fear, the way his brain wanted to lock down on his hopefulness. Nothing’s changed. You’re still a suspect. You’re still broke. You’re still a liability.

Unfit.

The waitress hesitated a few feet from their table.

“Can I … get you some dessert?”

Molten chocolate cake for Nora. A cup of decaf for Miles.

The waitress absorbed the order and stepped away, and Nora grinned at him. “Let’s go dancing. I want to dance with you again.”

Her words called up all the visual and tactile memories of Nora—dancing, the way she’d looked, the way she’d felt against him—and he was well on his way to hard. He dug in his pocket for his phone so he could look up clubs in Cleveland Heights. “Damn it. Left my phone in my jeans when we changed to come here.”

“I’ll look it up. I gotta run to the ladies’ room first.” She stood up and moved around the back of her chair.

He reached out a hand. “Leave your phone with me—I’ll look it up while you’re gone.”

She started to rummage through her bag for her phone, then stopped.

He didn’t understand at first. The way she hesitated, the apology forming in her eyes.

Then he got it.

She didn’t want to give him her phone. She didn’t trust him with it.

You’re an idiot, his brain informed him. You’re accused of embezzlement. She’s going to leave her phone with you and go to the bathroom?

—She said she believed you were innocent.

There are a million miles between saying you believe someone’s innocent and letting them hold an electronic device that probably contains every password and bank-account number and contact she’s ever collected in her life.

But his brain didn’t want to let it go.

—She said…

His agitation rose, and he clamped down on it. “Okay. That’s okay.” He said it as much to himself as to her. “We’ll look it up when you get back.” His voice was as steady as he could make it. No accusation. She didn’t deserve accusation or defensiveness. She had every right to fear him. To fear the life he could offer if they kept this up. Weekends here and there, oases in uncertainty. Long distance, hard work, money spent to bring them together, and for what? So he could drench her in his shame? So he could make her wait while he served jail time?

Red circles had risen on her cheeks. She pushed her phone across the table toward him, her gaze not quite meeting his, as if she were looking at his right cheek but not into his eyes.

He didn’t reach for it.

A chasm had opened under his feet, and he realized that it described the exact dimensions of whatever had, earlier in the meal, been locked up inside his chest. He’d known it was big but not exactly how big, how Grand Canyon, impossibly, soul-swallowingly large.

He still hadn’t taken the phone.

“I don’t like to leave my phone with anyone. Not even my mother.”

He’d never heard her sound so uncertain. Not even that first time she’d called him, when her words had almost been a question: “This is … the woman you kissed at midnight at that New Year’s Eve party?”

“You don’t have to apologize. It’s okay.”

But it was not. It was so far from okay. Because the chasm beneath him was the distance between what she’d said earlier—that she was convinced of his innocence—and what he needed her to believe: That he was not the kind of man who could ever in a million years have done what he was accused of doing. That he would no more have taken that money than he would have murdered his mother in her sleep.

But, more to the point, it was the distance between what he craved—a life with her—and the reality of what he could have. Between what he wanted to give her—everything—and what he could give her—only disquiet and awkwardness.

His throat hurt. His chest. God damn it, his ears.

He saw her across the table as if across that whole vast distance, the wonder and brightness of her receding, out of his grasp.

*

She’d meant every word she’d said earlier. She believed him that he hadn’t stolen the money. She’d stand up for him if someone questioned his innocence. She was in this with both feet.

But, as she’d feared, Henry had planted distrust in her, deeper than she could weed out. The moment with her phone had caught her off guard, and because it had, it had told the truth. A test Miles hadn’t meant to construct, a test that neither of them had seen coming.

She’d been willing to move forward with him, to commit her weekends, to commit herself. In theory. But when push came to shove, she’d balked. She trusted him with her heart but not with her phone. She didn’t believe, not completely, that he was innocent.