“What other music do you like?”
“Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Kanye.”
“Love Kanye. Got to meet him in a club in Manhattan about a year ago,” Kingsley said.
They kept talking about music and he found that he wasn’t listening to what she said so much as he was enjoying the lyrical sound of her voice. When she was happy it was easy to hear it. And when she laughed everything inside him came alive.
Mrs. Tillman served dinner and then disappeared back inside the house. They ate and talked about politics, books and movies. He found that subjects that had never seemed too important to him when he talked with other people now seemed very vital with her. She made him feel alive and passionate about things he’d never given much weight to before.
“My cousins in Madrid have a lot to say about politics, and every time I visit the dinner conversation is always dominated by the climate in Europe.”
He knew she was related through marriage to the Spanish royal family. Her cousin was married to the infanta. “Do you go to Spain a lot?”
“At least twice a year. Mom loves to visit her sister. You know, that’s where I went when everything happened with you.”
“I didn’t know that. I was a little preoccupied with...”
“Getting yourself out of jail,” she said. “Tell me about that.”
“That’s the last thing I want to talk about tonight,” he said.
She took his hand in hers. She knew she had little choice but to deal with this. She wanted to understand the man he’d been back then because it went a long way toward explaining the man Kingsley was today.
“I just want to know a little more about what happened,” she said. “You have questions about that night—I know you’ve been talking to our classmates—but I want to know about what happened after.”
Kingsley pulled his hand from hers. “I know you do, but that time just stirs up anger and fear. I will be happy to discuss it with you another time. Just know that entire summer I was wishing that I could be with you.”
* * *
Kingsley didn’t want to talk about that night. Not now. He spent all of his free time trying to figure out how to fix what had happened, but tonight he wanted to be a regular guy. The kind of man who could romance a woman he was interested in.
But that wasn’t who he was.
Was he fooling himself that they could ever be more than this—two people with a white-hot attraction between them and too much history?
He didn’t think of himself as an idiot. So why was he always taking missteps with Gabi? He saw hesitation in her now. She had wrapped one arm around her own waist and he felt it. Those damned chains of the past. He was never going to be free of what had happened.
Even being set free and having those charges dropped hadn’t removed the stain. Were he and Hunter fooling themselves that finding the person responsible for Stacia’s death was going to bring closure?
Until now, he hadn’t thought so. He wasn’t a defeatist so he refused to believe that this couldn’t be fixed.
But tonight...tonight he’d been in a different head space. Now he was back to the world where doubt, vengeance and anger seemed to rule.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up,” she said. “Why don’t we go for a walk on the beach and pretend we are just like any other couple.”
“Because we aren’t,” he said.
“No, we’re not. But for tonight I was forgetting it,” she said.
He could tell that she was sort of lying about it. But he let her get away with it because he wanted to pretend, too. Mrs. Tillman was in the house watching over Conner for this one night, so he knew it was safe for the both of them to be gone. He took her hand in his and she squeezed it tight.
For a minute he wished he were someone else. Anyone else. Just a regular guy with a normal job. Someone who maybe couldn’t afford a nanny but needed a sweet, sexy woman like Gabi in his life.
Then the line blurred.
He was that lonely single dad. He had been for a while. Peri had made it easy for him to ignore the fact that his life had turned into all dad, all the time. Work was time-consuming, but most of the time he had staff to deal with the most demanding clients. He had the right people in place to help him with Conner. The only place where he was missing the right person was romantically.
Tonight he had been on the path to fixing that before the past had once again smacked him square in the jaw. And he was smarting from it.
He wanted to react the way he always did. Maybe carry Gabi into the house to his bedroom. Make love to her until he couldn’t think anymore and then...then walk away. Get the hell out of California and give up on finding any closure. He would buy an island somewhere and homeschool Conner...except he wasn’t a coward. He had never run from anything. He wasn’t going to start now.