Finding Eden (A Sign of Love Novel)(85)

I relaxed my shoulders and tilted my head. I opened my mouth to speak, but the detective's laugh floated up the stairs, the officers chatting loudly. My eyes moved toward the stairs and then back to Calder.
"Go answer their questions," he said more gently, turning toward the bathroom. I sighed and turned toward my room. I'd answer their questions and get them out of here.
An hour later, when the detective and officers left, I heard splashing sounds coming from the pool outside and looked out the back window to see Calder doing laps in the pool.
I went upstairs and changed into my swimsuit. When I walked out the side door onto the patio, Calder was out of the pool and sitting on one of the deck chairs next to the stone bar. Water was cascading down his bare, smooth, muscled chest in little rivulets and his hair was pushed back away from his face in wet spikes. God he was ridiculously gorgeous. And there was something especially beautiful about him when he was wet. I'd thought it before and I thought it now—it was as if water was his own personal element and he wore it better than anyone else on the face of the earth. "Hey, handsome. I thought you were getting in the shower."
His eyes swept up and down my bikini-clad body and I blushed despite myself. This man had seen me as naked as the day I was born a hundred times over, and from every angle imaginable, and yet I still felt that same modesty I'd been taught to feel when I was showing an "indecent" amount of skin.
"I changed my mind."
I sat down on his lap and ran my thumbs over his chiseled cheekbones and down his strong, masculine jaw, rough with a day's worth of dark stubble. I leaned forward and kissed his lips. He tasted sweet. "Hmm, what have you been drinking?"
"Just Coke," he said, looking embarrassed as if that was some sort of crime. I smiled at him.
"What'd the detective want?" he asked, his jaw tensing.
I studied him. I ran one fingertip over his dark eyebrows, one by one. "Just more questions about Clive's role in the council—what I experienced of him in the main lodge," I said in answer to his question. "You don't have to dislike Detective Lowe. He's actually very nice."
Calder's jaw ticked once, but he didn't deny disliking the detective. He took a deep breath and studied my face. I met his eyes. "I just worry," he started. "Sometimes I think maybe you wonder . . . or maybe you will wonder—"
"Then ask me," I said softly. "All you ever have to do is ask me."
Vulnerability skated over his expression. "Do you ever wonder what it'd be like to be with another man? A man you could start fresh with? A man who could give you more than me? A man who's better than me?"
"No. No man can give me more than you. No man is better than you," I said without hesitation.
He smiled a baffled, crooked smile full of hope and my heart lurched in my chest. A flash of him as a little boy looking up at me after I'd put a butterscotch candy in his hand raced through my mind, and all the love and tenderness I felt for him filled my chest so full I ached with it.
His face went serious. "I don't even have a name, Eden. No one's even come forward to claim me. No one ever even reported me missing."
"Oh, Calder," I said. "Is that why?" He'd seemed so quiet lately, lost in his own head, and he'd leave the room each time the police came by, and now I knew why. The news they were bringing was never about him. "There must be an explanation," I said.
He shrugged.
"The police said they'd help you and Xander get the necessary paperwork to get IDs."
"Yeah, but it won't really be me. It will be who Hector made me. If I'm Calder Raynes, I'll always be a slave, a water bearer." He said the last two words with disgust lacing his voice.