Page 72 of Bride Under Contract

‘I know.’

‘So can we change the subject? Like you did when I asked why we had to have dinner with your lawyer?’

She lay there.

‘If I get my own, will you sit through a chummy dinner with them?’

‘No.’ He gave a soft laugh, realising now how odd it must have seemed. ‘Jonathon does a lot for me.’

‘You pay him to.’

‘Not just that.’

He loathed sharing anything personal, but he’d just asked for the same from her. More, he’d asked her to sit through dinner with two people who were not only clearly on his side, but actively suspicious of her.

‘I don’t expect you to get it, but they have both looked out for me. A lot.’

‘How?’

He swallowed before he told her something very few knew—and it had nothing to with the fact she’d signed the NDA.

That wasn’t even a thought in his head.

More, it felt right to reveal it.

‘I lived with them for a couple of months while it was decided where I’d end up. Jonathon wanted to be sure I had a say—well, of sorts. I wasn’t talking then.’

‘At all?’

‘Not much. I could hear, though.’ He gave her shoulder a squeeze, making another little joke, even if the topic wasn’t funny. But it seemed they had this new language they shared, because she looked up briefly and smiled.

‘What did you hear?’ Grace asked.

Her head went back to his chest, her eyes open as she listened. Usually she’d close her eyes to picture things. Only now she needed every detail—how one hand held her arm, and the other found her fingers and toyed with her ring as he spoke.

‘My uncle was prepared to have me,’ he said.

‘Benedict’s father?’

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Well, he wanted to get his hands on my parents’ money. We’d be lying in a cheap motel now if he’d got his hands on it.’

Grace found that she was smiling, wishing she was in a motel with him for gorgeous, uncomplicated sex. Pull-up-the-car-and-get-a-room sex. And she found that she blinked in shock at her own thoughts, especially when they were discussing something so serious.

‘What’s funny?’ he asked, and it dawned on her that he, too, was aware of even her tiniest movement.

‘Us in a motel.’

‘What about it?’

‘You were talking about your uncle...’ She nudged him, knowing he would happily stay off track and wanting to know more.

‘Jonathon threatened my uncle with an exposé, so he soon pulled out. Really, you can see where Benedict gets it from. Then there was my grandfather... He was eccentric, at best, and grieving.’

He fell silent for a moment, and she watched his finger hover over the stone of her ring.

‘As well as that, I didn’t want to go back to Borneo—it was a couple of years before I did. And it was Jonathon and his wife who stepped up.’

‘So they took you in?’

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