Her mouth twisted and she couldn’t drag her eyes from the hand across his heart. “Do you plan on tracking down all the men who’ve wounded me?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
She laughed despite herself. “I keep telling you I don’t need you to take care of me.”
“And yet once in a while it would be nice if you just shut up and let me.” His brows knitted together. Then, “Odd.”
Not odd, she thought. Sweet. Darling. But the fact that he couldn’t see it, didn’t understand what it might mean, scared her silly.
“It’s not your job to make up for their shortfalls,” she said.
“Not yours either.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
“I am right. Always.”
She coughed out a laugh, her eyes landing on her bag with the legal pad therein—all the things he’d revealed whether he’d wanted to or not.
“Not always.”
“Oh, really?”
“Every mistake I’ve made has been in a full-bodied effort to find my place, my people. While you have it all, right at your fingertips, and you’re determined to throw it away.”
She felt Nate still even before her eyes swung back to his.
You have me too, she said with her eyes. If you want me. But the stillness didn’t abate. If anything it cooled about ten degrees, and she knew she had her answer. Even if he saw, even if he had any kind of sense of how she felt, he clearly didn’t want to.
“I appreciate it,” he said. “I do. From afar.”
She’d never seen him look more like granite personified. He looked as if he’d been born of the grey walls and blond wood, and faux taxidermy. Maybe that was what the designer had seen. The true heart of the man—cold as any stone.
“I wonder if you know how far away you are. You’re way over there. And you don’t let anybody come close. Not your gorgeous family, who adore you to their very ends. And certainly not me. Paying me off, bringing me Stu, reminding me every two seconds that the end is nigh. Love isn’t poison, Nate. It won’t kill you. It’s natural, it’s complicated, its crazy-making, but it’s a fact of life.”
“Like death and taxes.”
Saskia threw her hands in the air and swore like a sailor. “Why the hell am I bothering? You’re a lost cause. I knew it, and still it didn’t stop me.”
“Stop you, what?”
“Oh, no. All you’re getting from me any more is exactly what I want to give—which right now is less than diddly-squat.”
She wouldn’t have thought a man could be as still as Nate was in those next moments. While she had so much energy pouring through her she wanted to stamp her feet and throw her arms in the air, he didn’t even blink.
Then he said, “You constantly—and I mean constantly—amaze me.”
Her eyes cut to his.
“Such a little thing, with so much fight in you.”
“It’s not fight. It’s passion. Verve. Joie de vivre.”
One eyebrow slid north. If she’d had a bow and arrow and any kind of athletic skill she’d have shot him between the damn things.
“Nate,” she said, her hands out in supplication. Give me a sign. Give me a break!
He caught her hands to him and didn’t let go. “Cards on the table.”
Her heart stopped. From one beat to the next—nothing. Then she curled her fingers into his and her blood began to race. “Fine. You first.”
He laughed, the sound soft, raw, the loveliest sound in the entire world. “You started it, sweetheart. Tell me what you came here to say. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
Saskia breathed out hard. The man had more charm in his little finger than the rest of the population of Melbourne combined. Maybe she could tell him that.
He looked into her eyes. She’d never felt him more present, never seen the real him so clearly in the beautiful fathomless blue.
“I’m just a man, Saskia. Flesh and blood and instinct. I don’t know what you want unless you tell me.”
She could tell him. She could. It was simple after all.
Name: Saskia Bloom
Age: twenty-eight
Looking for: a way to tell the man sitting before her that she’s in love for the first time in her life
She took a breath. Tried to still the centrifuge in her mind. To forget herself. And it was like one of those dreams where she felt a scream rising inside her but no matter how wide she opened her mouth no sound came out.
Nate’s eyes flickered between hers, then they softened. He turned her hand over in his and lifted it to his mouth, kissing one palm and then the other before letting her go. “Just as I thought. You’re no more ready for this than I am.”