He chuckled and asked, “Am I making you nervous, Tula?”
“Of course not,” she replied, while her mind was screaming, Yes! Everything about him was suddenly making her nervous and she wasn’t sure how to handle it. Since she’d met him, he’d irritated her, intrigued her. But this anxiousness was a new sensation.
Tula knew everyone thought of her as flaky. The crazy artist. But she wasn’t really. She had always known what she wanted. She lived the way she liked and made no apologies for it. She always knew who was in her life and what they meant to her.
At least, she had until Simon. But he was a whole different ball game. He went from insulting her to seducing her. He made her furious one moment and hot and achy the next. For a man who had so loved his routine, he was becoming entirely too unpredictable.
She couldn’t seem to pin him down. Or guess what he was going to do or say. She had thought him just another staid businessman, but he was more than that. She simply wasn’t sure what that meant for her. Which made her a little nervous, though she’d never admit to it. So to keep herself steady, she started talking again.
“You’ve heard my story, so tell me, how did wearing a three-piece suit by the age of two affect you?”
He gave her a half smile and sat down beside her on the window seat. Turning his head, he stared through the glass at the winter afternoon behind them.
A storm was piling up on the horizon, Tula saw as she followed his gaze. Thunderclouds huddled together in a dark gray mass that promised rain by evening. Already, the wind was picking up, sending the na**d branches of the trees in the park into a frenzied dance. Mothers gathered up their children as the sky darkened further and soon the park was as empty as Tula felt.
When Simon finally spoke, his voice was so soft, she nearly missed it. “You think you’ve got me figured out, do you?”
She studied him, trying to read his eyes. But it was as if he’d drawn a shutter over them, locking himself away from her.
“I thought so,” she admitted and her confusion must have been evident in her tone. “When I first met you, you reminded me of…someone I used to know,” she said, picturing her father, fierce gaze locked on some hapless employee. “But the more I got to know you, the more I realized that I didn’t know you at all. Well, that made no sense,” she ended with a laugh.
“Yeah, it did,” Simon said, shifting to look at her again, closing off the outside world with the intensity of his gaze. Making her feel as if she were the only thing in the world that mattered at the moment.
“Simon…”
“Nobody is what they look like on the surface,” he murmured, features carefully blank and unreadable as he studied her. “I’m just really realizing that.”
Ten
He was looking at her as if he had never seen her before. As if he were trying to see into her heart and mind again, searching out her secrets. Her desires.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Tula said.
“Maybe I don’t, either.” He took a breath, blew it out and after a long, thoughtful moment, changed the subject abruptly. “You know, I grew up here, in this house. My great-grandfather built it originally.”
“It’s a lovely house,” she said, briefly allowing her gaze to sweep the confines of the room. “It feels warm.”
“Yeah, it does.” His gaze was still locked on her. “Now, more than ever.”
Why was he telling her this? Why was he being…nice? Weren’t they at odds? Didn’t their argument still hang in the air between them? Only a few minutes ago, he had looked at her with cool detachment and now everything felt different. She just didn’t understand why.
“Several years ago, my father almost lost the house,” he said, forcing an offhand attitude that didn’t mesh with the sudden stiffness of his shoulders or the tightness in his jaw. “Bad investments, trusting the wrong people. My dad didn’t have a head for business.”
“I can sympathize,” she muttered, remembering how many times her own father had made her feel small and ignorant because she hadn’t cared to learn the intricacies of keeping ledgers and accounts receivable.
He kept talking, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “He was too unorganized. Couldn’t keep anything straight.” Shaking his head, he once more stared out at the gathering storm and focused on the windowpane as the first drops of rain plopped against it. But Tula knew he wasn’t looking at the outside world so much as he was staring into his own past. Just as she had moments ago.
“My dad entered a deal once with a man who was so unscrupulous he damn near succeeded in taking this house out from under us. This man cheated and lied and did whatever he had to in his effort to bury my father and the Bradley family in general.” Simon shook his head again. “My father never saw it coming, either. It was sheer luck that kept this house in the family. Luck that saved what was left of our business.”
She heard the old anger in his voice and wondered who it was that had almost cost his family so much. Whoever it was, Simon was still furious with the man and she wished she could say something that would ease that feeling. Tula knew all too well that hanging on to anger didn’t hurt the one it was focused on. It only made you miserable.
“I’m glad it worked out that way,” she said simply. “I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for your father. And you.”
He looked at her as if judging what she’d said, trying to decide if she had meant it. Finally though, he accepted her words with a nod. “In a way, I guess it wasn’t my dad’s fault. He went into the family business because his father wanted it that way. My dad hated his life, knew he wasn’t any good at it and that must have been hard, living with a sense of failure every day.”
“I know what that’s like.”
He tipped his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. “Do you?”
She smiled, actually enjoying this quiet time with him. The talking, the sharing of old pains and secrets. She had never really talked about her father with anyone but Anna. But somehow, it seemed right now, to let Simon know that he wasn’t alone in his feelings about the past.
“My father had plans for me, too,” she said sadly. “And they didn’t have anything to do with what I wanted.”
He nodded again thoughtfully. “For me, I watched what happened with my dad and I learned.”
“What?” she prompted, her voice soft and low. “You learned what?”