Since I Saw You (Because You Are Mine 4)

“Okay, so we’re not going to talk about it,” she said.

He sighed in a beleaguered fashion. “No, it’s not that. Just . . . excuse me for a moment.”

“Okay.” Was he irritated at her probing? Maybe he was going to use the men’s room. She sat forward curiously when instead of walking toward the rear of the establishment where the restrooms were located, he calmly walked around the bar. The waitress immediately noticed his tall, formidable and uninvited form behind the bar, but the bartender kept wrestling with and poking at a countertop shake freezer and blender, cursing. Kam thumped the bartender on the shoulder.

“Do you mind?” he asked, pointing at the machine.

“Be my guest,” the bemused-looking bartender said after a second, stepping aside.

Kam had caught the attention of everyone sitting at the bar now, not just Lin. He stepped up to the machine and opened a utility cover. For a moment, he just studied the whole unit. Lin had the impression he was absorbing the machine somehow. It was a little how she felt whenever he looked at her with his laserlike stare that seemed to see more than just the surface, like he was examining her component parts and analyzing how they all worked together. She couldn’t say precisely what he did next, but if she had to describe it, she’d say he flipped one thing, twisted another, and jerked a third: one, two, three, quick as counting up to something good.

He turned on a switch and the blender made the familiar monotonous roar Lin had heard sporadically when they first entered.

“I hadn’t even noticed it was broken. That was nice of you to fix it,” Lin said in amazement when he sat down again next to her at the bar a moment later, waving off the bartender’s profuse thanks with a look of vague discomfort on his face.

“Not really,” he said, his mouth curled in a self-derisive expression. “I wanted my milk shake.”

“That’s not it,” she said quietly after studying him closely for several seconds. “It bothered you. Having something out of joint . . . broken in your vicinity. Didn’t it?”

He frowned, not replying for a moment.

“I can’t stand to be around a machine that doesn’t work. It’s like they call out to me. Scream at me. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”

She recalled him reading her body the other night with his touch. “And with human beings? Is it the same? Is that why you studied medicine?”

“Human beings, animals . . . anything that isn’t humming the way it should. Anything broken won’t let me rest. If something is out of rhythm, I hear it. Feel it. It puts me out of joint, too.”

“That’s fascinating,” she said softly. Strange that such a rugged, bold man could feel the delicacies of the universe so acutely.

“Why didn’t you finish your residency after graduating?” Lin wondered as the bartender put place settings, Lin’s salad, and Kam’s milk shake in front of them.

“My mother got ill.”

“She lived at Aurore Manor, didn’t she?” Lin asked.

He nodded. “She worked there. She grew up in an orphanage in Dublin. After she signed up for a maid employment service, she was transferred to Aurore from Ireland. I think she considered herself a temporary Irish visitor until the day she died, even though she lived in northern France for twenty-seven years of her life. She never really mastered the French language, even after all that time,” he explained with a small smile.

She watched as he lifted the long silver spoon from his shake and ladled some of the thick, white liquid between his lips. He slipped it out. The frost on the chilled spoon vanished in a second by the heat of his mouth. She blinked, mesmerized by the sight. “My father seduced her when she was nineteen,” Kam continued bluntly, “got her pregnant with me, and probably never said a dozen words to her between then and the time he died.”

Lin took a sip of water. He’d sounded brutally honest about his father’s crimes. What a strange, lonely existence Kam Reardon must have lived growing up on the grounds of his twisted father’s home.

“But Trevor Gaines spoke to you,” she said softly after a moment, studying his profile. “He taught you what he knew about machines and computers and watches.”

“Yeah. He spoke to me. He allowed me to live on the estate and eat his food and work my ass off for him. When I was eight, I begged him to send me to the public school in the village. He permitted it because he thought the basic knowledge of mathematics might make me a better assistant in his laboratory, and he didn’t have the interest in teaching me myself. When I got older, I bargained with the knowledge of how to improve a couple of his inventions. He sent me to college in exchange for the information, and then resented me ever after for surpassing his mechanical abilities. I guess all that makes him Father of the Year,” Kam said with a dark sideways glance.

She inhaled slowly, trying to dissipate the ache in her chest. “I’m sorry, Kam. Was . . . it better getting that grudging attention from him? Or would you have rather been like Lucien and Ian?”

“Lucien and Ian were better off shot of him altogether. Best thing Gaines ever did for them, ignoring them the way he did,” Kam muttered viciously. He inhaled when he noticed her startled expression.

Not wanting to say something when words would never suffice or make him think she couldn’t handle what he’d said, she picked up her fork and mixed her dressing onto her salad. Neither of them spoke for a charged moment.

“Living in the vicinity of Trevor Gaines was like living near a perpetually broken machine,” he said in a subdued tone after a pause, staring straight ahead. “It almost drove me mad to be near him, like living with a relentless clunk and bang, a grinding on my bones, just from his damn presence. At one point, he requested that I live up at the manor with him. My mother insisted I go—she lived in some kind of dreamworld when it came to him and me—so I went. He had me dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy and tried to teach me to be a gentleman,” Kam recalled with simmering sarcasm. “But I knew who he really was. What he really was. Who better than me, after what he’d done to my mother? Filthy fucking hypocrite,” he seethed under his breath. “I finally lost it and told him what he could do with his social graces. No,” he concluded darkly. “Ian and Lucien were lucky to never have laid eyes on the bastard.”