The Bachelor's Baby (Bachelor Auction Book 3)(10)
Something inside him dropped off a cliff. “Really?”
She shrugged fatalistically. “Career calls. I was here a few weeks ago for Christmas so this visit isn’t a proper vacation. I only came back to…” she wrinkled her nose and quoted the bible. “Put away my childish things.”
Her deliberate tone was spoken with an inward sort of reflection, like she wasn’t being as flippant as she wanted to appear.
“That sounded sad,” he noted, oddly caught by her change of mood. “You just said you’ll be back to visit.”
“I will, but I realized this trip that I probably won’t come back here to live. My safety net is gone. So yes, I’m sad.”
And apprehensive, if he wasn’t mistaken. He wouldn’t call himself deeply intuitive, but you didn’t work closely with men in tight confines around heavy machinery without learning to read faces. Hers was taut beneath her projection of friendliness.
“Problems at work?” he asked.
She flashed a glance up at him, wariness practically sparking off her like static, before dropping her gaze to her drink and asking, “Why do you say that?”
Interesting.
“You said you didn’t have a safety net here anymore. That implies you need or want one. What’s wrong? Are they downsizing or something?” He intensified his scavenge across her features, trying to read clues in an expression that went from poker-bluff to surprised and maybe…relieved? Because he hadn’t guessed correctly?
“No, I have a job as long as I want it,” she said with more confidence than most people showed these days. “The safety net remark just means—” She shrugged. “I took a chance when I moved away. Most people want to know there’s a Plan B when you take a risk, that you can fall back on the familiar. I’ve always had that and it was comforting. But I don’t really need it anymore. I’m pretty established in Chicago.”
He’d never had a fallback. Once his father had died, he’d been his mother’s backup as much as the other way around. She hadn’t pulled any punches about their situation, and he’d felt the gravity of their circumstances every single day. By the time they’d been kicked out of Charlie’s, he’d been the breadwinner and fully responsible for the both of them.
“You like Chicago?” he asked, curious how she’d wound up there from here.
“I’d better, hadn’t I?” she scoffed, pretending to be tough again, then quirked her mouth in rueful confession. “Things have been less than ideal lately. I’m given to understand it won’t always be this way, but for now it sucks and I would have preferred to know I could run home anytime. But now I can’t. So I’ll have to grin and bear it.”
His hackles rose as a suspicion formed, one that always had the power to light his fuse. “What are you talking about? Not sexual harassment?”
“What? No,” she dismissed, plainly surprised. A frown of mixed emotions chased across her expression. After a brief second of indecision, she allowed, “Not exactly.” She took a deep swallow and she set her drink away, hand tremoring a little. “It’s nothing, really. Kind of a stalker.”
The same but different. His insides went cold. “Are you serious?”
Her nod was more a hitch and shrug, trying to be dismissive, like it wasn’t a big deal. “I haven’t told anyone here, not even Blake. He’d lose his mind and there’s nothing he could do. Everything that can be done, has been. The station has been great, following up with the police to take every measure, hiring me personal security, but…” She shrugged. “There’s only so much they can do.”
“You can’t go back to that,” he stated.
Her impatient wave dismissed his remark. “I can’t quit my job. It’s an inconvenience—”
“It’s more than an inconvenience, Meg,” he cut in, old anger rising like a skeleton from a grave.
“Whoa,” she cautioned, palm almost touching his chest. “I can see you’re on my side, which is nice, but this is exactly why I haven’t told Blake. You guys with your overdeveloped protective instincts. Changing my routines is an inconvenience,” she clarified. “Never going anywhere alone is a total pain, but I’m not about to let a stranger cut short a career I’ve spent my whole life building. I’ll figure out how to live my life around these restrictions.”
He told himself to back off, but he knew exactly how vulnerable a single woman was, no matter how resourceful and independent she tried to be.
“You really should talk to your brother about it.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up. Tell me about you,” she insisted. “Why are you here? In Marietta, I mean. Ranching. ‘Cause that’s a really nice suit and it doesn’t look very old.”
Her switch to interviewer threw him and he debated pushing her to expound on her own situation, but he could see she wanted to close that door.
“I got tired,” he replied. “Money’s nice and so is the Caribbean, but frankly, when I finally got time off, the last thing I wanted to do was get on yet another airplane to visit the beach. And the men might as well be cattle for all the ways I had to ride herd. If they so much as grazed the wrong blade of grass, my ass was in a sling. I’m not saying we don’t need environmental laws, but I got tired of micromanaging to enforce them.”