Layla turned around in his desk chair. “Wait, you have a detective you keep on retainer just to keep me from hiring my own detective?”
He smirked. “No, Layla. I hired a detective to investigate you when you first came to town, then I kept him on to try to find out who’s been threatening you. The preventing you from investigating component is only one of his duties.”
Layla stared at him for a few angry seconds before saying, “Okay, I’m leaving.”
Now he went from smug to confused. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” she said, grabbing her purse.
“Why?” he asked. He tried to ignore the way his heart sank at just the thought of sleeping in his bed without her.
“Why? Why?! Because I’m mad at you, and that’s what women do when they’re mad at the guy they’re with. They leave. I’m sure this scenario has played out for you before.”
He shook his head, still confused. “No, not really. I’m used to a more passive-aggressive fuming in silence.”
“Well, I’m not that kind of woman.”
He knew she wasn’t. It was one of the many things he liked about her when she wasn’t trying to pry open the Pandora’s box of their past. “Why can’t you let this go?” he asked.
“Because it’s my past, almost a whole year gone. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be walking around with a missing part of your life, especially since it had nothing to do with the fall—”
She stopped, her face making it obvious she’d said more than she wanted to.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She turned her head away, studying the moonlit view of the city’s landscape outside of his window.
And it happened again, that tug to help her, even if it would be against his own interest to do so.
He went over to her and ran a finger down her smooth cheek. “Tell me,” he said.
She kept looking out the window as she said, “I hit my head and that sent me into a coma, but…” It seemed like she struggled to get this next part out: “I didn’t have any brain damage. They did all these scans and everything came back clean, which meant there was no reason I should have lost that year. Basically it’s a psychological condition. It’s not that I can’t remember, but I don’t want to for some reason.
“They sent me to a psychiatrist, and she said I should come back here to see if anything jogged my memory. But then I got a scholarship to go back to college, and it took a few years to find a job opening in Pittsburgh. Still, I’m here now, and I need to know what happened. Please just tell me.”
Layla’s pleading gaze tore at his heart and made him want to tell her everything. He prided himself on being a cold bastard, tried to live up to his business reputation in every way. But this woman did something to him, made him want to do the right thing, even if it meant hurting himself.
“Ask me again in six weeks,” he said. “And I’ll tell you everything once you’re out of the state.”
“Nathan, I…” she stopped, but then decided to say it anyway. “I know we don’t know each other well anymore. But I care about you. If you let me out of the contract, and just tell me what happened, maybe we could—”
“Sshh.” He pulled her into his arms and held her close, breathing in her earthy scent. “Six weeks. Just give me that and if you still want to know, I’ll tell you. But give me the six weeks.”
She drew away from him and he could see all the questions still burning in her eyes, but she clamped her lips together before saying, “Okay, six weeks.”
His heart cried out at the reprieve and he kissed her hot and hard, newly desperate to be inside her, to have her in his bed.
At that point he knew there was no use denying what he’d begun to suspect ever since inviting Layla to stay with him in the first place. He had tried to fight it with anger, with hostility, with sex, but it was too late now. He had already fallen back in love with her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TWO more weeks passed by in the blink of an eye. Or at least that was how it felt to Layla, considering she still hadn’t managed to find even so much as an address for Andrew Sinclair. Nathan had proven to be too distracting an alternative to her amateur detective hunt. How could she make digging around in her past a priority when her present held an extremely sexy man who she’d only be able to enjoy for a few more weeks? Also, Nathan had promised he’d tell her everything after she moved, and she believed him. He might not have been the nicest man on the planet, but he struck her as someone who kept his promises.
However, just like she’d been dragging her feet about finding Andrew Sinclair, with only a month to go until her contracted eviction from Pittsburgh, she still hadn’t figured out where to settle down next. Part of her wanted to move as far away from Nathan as possible, while another part of her yearned for him to let her to stay, to forget about his stupid contract, and continue on as they were, perhaps even going as far as to fall in love—
Layla pushed that thought out of her head. She couldn’t let her heart nudge her in that direction. As any simple Google search would tell you, Nathan Sinclair didn’t fall in love. He dated and ditched, and from what she could see, he had never had a relationship that lasted over a couple of months. Allowing herself to even think about the possibility of falling in love with him would lead to disaster. No, she decided the morning of their one-month “anniversary,” she needed to start planning for life after Nathan Sinclair, even if the thought of letting him go made her feel a bit weepy.
She bullied herself into making a to-do list for her future move on the bus ride to work. And during her fifteen minute break, she used the smartphone Nathan had gifted her with a few days ago to research Savannah, Georgia, a hip, southern city that might appreciate a business as quaint as a physical therapy spa. But a call from Nathan himself interrupted her surfing.
“Hi,” she said. “What do you think about Savannah for a physical therapy spa?”
“I’d have to research the market a little further, but if we’re just speculating, it sounds fine.”
“Well, then how about—”
“What are you doing for lunch today?”
The abrupt change of subject didn’t surprise Layla. As their time together decreased, so had Nathan’s willingness to talk about her move, even though he was the one who had forced it on her. “I was just planning to grab a sandwich from the vending machine.”