Within These Walls (Within These Walls #1)(34)

I nodded. “A brother.”

“Older or younger?”

“Older.”

“Do you like him?” she asked.

I let out a thoughtful breath. “Like is a strong word. Tolerate is probably more appropriate. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him.”

“How come?” She took a small bite of chocolate between her lips.

I watched the spoon dip into her mouth and reappear as I thought about how to answer.

How much should I tell her?

I’m neither weak nor fragile. Don’t think for one single second that I can’t handle anything you can.

She’d been treated like a porcelain doll her entire life. If I did the same, I’d be no different than anyone else in her life, and I wanted to be different. I wanted to be the one she could trust.

My conscience took that moment in time to remind me in detailed flashbacks of a younger, broken, and more desperate version of myself begging for Megan’s father not to give up her organs.

I told that ass**le to take a hike.

The past couldn’t be undone. There was nothing I could do to change what had happened in the hallways of this hospital three years ago. The only thing I could do was make the life of the woman next to me better in every way possible.

Would anything change if I were to tell her that I was the reason she didn’t get that heart?

No. So, why bother?

It was a terrible, horrible lame excuse. In the back of my head, I knew I was still trying to protect her. I was doing the same thing that her mother and doctors had done her entire life—sugarcoating and suffocating the truth—but I was also doing it to protect me.

So, I’d do what I could and tell her everything else but that awful moment in my history. It would be more than I’d told any other person on the planet since the day I arrived in California.

“We had a falling out. I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family in almost three years.”

Her eyes met mine and softened. “That’s awful. How does that even happen?”

“Well, it’s a long and complicated sad story.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Okay, but first, I need to explain something,” I said.

I reached down and grabbed my ID badge. It had the trademark dreadful picture with bad lighting and my blank expression slapped on the front. Underneath was my name—Jude C.

“I don’t even know your last name,” she said before covering her mouth with her hand. She looked mortified.

As I peeled her fingers from her face one at a time, I noticed she felt warmer than normal. “You feel hot. Are you feeling okay?”

“What? Yes, I’m fine. You’re just trying to change the subject!”

I let it go, but I made a mental note to check her later. “No one knows my last name. It was something I asked for when I was hired. My last name is…well-known.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you, like, a prince or something? Is this the part of the movie where I get to move to a castle? I don’t think I can walk in heels.”

“My last name is Cavanaugh.”

There was no reaction. She just stared at me, trying to put all the pieces together.

“Like the bank, Cavanaugh Investments in New York? The family who makes the Trumps look like paupers? They’ve been all over the news lately. You must get confused with them all the time. Don’t they have a son named Jude who—” Her hand went to her mouth, and her eyes widened.

“Hasn’t been seen publicly for three years,” I finished her sentence.

“They just keep saying he’s on vacation or too busy in meetings,” she said absently.

“My brother and father have always been very good at lying. God forbid that we have a family scandal. They get away with it because I wasn’t around much in the years prior to…me leaving. People barely remember what I look like anymore. I was away at college for so long that the public lost interest, and that left my brother, Roman, plenty of time to soak up the limelight.”

She looked at me, her eyes searching my face, as if seeing me for the first time. This was what I’d feared—that she would see me differently.

Am I still Jude? Or would I forever be Jude Cavanaugh—heir to a multibillion-dollar company?

She continued assessing me, her eyes traveling over my features, down the length of my inked arms, and back up to my messy tresses. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes, as I waited for the altered tone or the shocked gasp to come.

What I got was pudding on my face. I opened my eyes in amazement and found her giggling. Leftover pudding still clung to her pointer finger, and she was just leaning over to lick it off.

I stopped her, pulling the single digit into my own mouth and sucking it clean. Her eyes heated from the contact, and then they went round with unheard laughter when she once again saw the pudding smeared down my right cheek.

“You don’t look like him. You’re a little rougher looking,” she said, still giggling at her mess.

“Well, that was the idea. New look—”

“New life?” she finished.

I felt myself wince.

Screeching brakes, shattering glass, Megan screaming.

I can’t get to her.

Then, silence. Nothing but silence.

“Something like that,” I mumbled. “So, whom do I look like?” I managed, blinking rapidly to pull myself back from hell. Stay in the present.