Page 20 of Billionaire Unexplained: Kaleb

“I know her, too,” Kaleb said flatly.

My eyes widened. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I swear I’ll never tell anyone about anything you say right now.”

He shook his head. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you with anything we want to discuss. Hell, I’ve spilled my guts to you about things I don’t talk about with anyone. However, if I tell you, it would reveal more than we agreed to share.”

I was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

We had made a pact to just be Kaleb and Anna without revealing anything we didn’t want to talk about.

Personally, I didn’t give a damn about our original agreement anymore. I trusted Kaleb.

In fact, I wanted to tell Kaleb everything, and I planned on doing just that before we parted ways.

I didn’t want him to discover the truth someday and think that I’d played him for a fool.

Maybe it had only been a few days, but he’d come to mean too much to me not to be totally honest.

“I have no problem crossing that line, Anna,” he said in a husky voice, his gorgeous eyes glued to mine. “Not if you don’t. Are you really ready to go back to Los Angeles? If you’re not, I’d like you to come back to Crystal Fork with me. Take as long as you want to grieve and heal before you head back to California. No pressure, but I have plenty of space at my place, and I’d really like it if you’d come home with me.”

My breath left my body in an audible whoosh!

He had no idea how tempted I was to take him up on that offer.

I’d only rented the home down the road for a few days. Just enough time to get my head together a little.

I was more together, but was I ready to go back to California and jump into my old life immediately?

Honestly, I wasn’t.

I felt like I was ready to do some work, but not to fall back into the life I’d lived before.

Not yet.

I wasn’t as strong as I needed to be for my lifestyle, and I was afraid that the pressures I had to face in Los Angeles would crush the progress I’d made so far.

Kaleb’s invitation was sincere. He actually did want me to go with him. I could see it in his eyes, and I’d learned enough about Kaleb to know that he wasn’t a guy who offered to do something just to be polite.

God, I really, really wanted to accept that invitation.

“I’d really like that, but it could get…complicated.”

He still knew next to nothing about my life in California.

He smiled ruefully. “I always thought I didn’t do complicated, but you’re definitely an exception to that rule. I don’t really give a shit if this complicates the hell out of my life, Anna. All I know right now is that I’m not even remotely ready to say goodbye to you. I also think you need more time before you throw yourself back into your old life. It sounds like more stress than you need right now.”

Like it or not, Kaleb had assigned himself the job of being my older, male protector.

While there was a part of me that loved that alpha protector side of him, there was also a big piece of me that wanted him to see me as more than just a friend and a female who he needed to protect.

I wanted him to look at me like I was a woman he desired because I knew I looked at him like a man I definitely wanted to know intimately.

Was I hiding it well?

Probably.

I was a master at hiding my emotions when other people were around me.

However, I wondered just how long it would be before he realized that I desperately wanted to go to bed with him and do more than just sleep in the same bed or use his body heat as my personal electric blanket.

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