Page 13 of The Au Pair Affair

“A small price to pay for me being safe?” she supplied, quietly.

Burgess grunted at the table, no idea how to respond without sounding ridiculous.

Tallulah remained silent for several seconds. “Maybe I just don’t have a lot of experience with athletes, especially hockey players, but you come across as such a contradiction, you know? Is it possible to have so much aggression inside of you and still be so... worried about someone you’ve only met twice?”

More than possible. It was reality. “Yes.”

“I wish I could know that for sure,” she whispered, seeming to surprise herself by letting that slip. “Um. Could you satisfy my curiosity about something?”

“Shoot.”

She squinted one eye. “Do you feel bad about breaking that guy’s nose?”

The question caught him off guard. “Do I feelbad?”

“Yes.”

Burgess let his breath hiss out slowly, knowing he couldn’t be anything less than baldly honest with this woman, at all times,even if that honesty probably wouldn’t earn him any points. “He’d been high sticking all night. I’ve been playing against that jackass for six years—he should have known me well enough to know a warning was coming and protected himself better.” He really wasn’t doing himself any favors here.At all.But he didn’t know how to do anything but impart the ugly truth. “I guess I didn’t mean tobreakthe damn thing. If it makes you feel better, I sent a six pack to his hotel room after the game.”

That made her sit up straighter. “Did you really? What kind?”

“Sam Adams. Obviously.”

She snorted. “A beer originally brewed in Boston. So really, it was just another dig.”

“How can I explain this...” He drummed his fingers on the table. “If I’d sent him an apology, it only would have made the broken nose sting harder. Sam Adams was a way of saying I’m sorry, man, but also fuck you. He keeps his pride that way. Much better. See?”

She blinked. “Hockey players are built different, aren’t they?”

“You have no idea.”

Tallulah picked up her smoothie and sipped from the straw. He did the same. They considered each other across the table like debaters preparing for the next question.

“I’m just going to come right out and say something, Tallulah, because it feels like it needs to be said.” This could be a huge risk, but the verbal reassurance wouldn’t stay locked inside. He’d always been blunt and direct, often to his own detriment, but Tallulah was too smart to buy any bullshit and he didn’t want to sell her any, either. “I’ve never laid a hand on a woman in my fucking life and I never will.”

Her chest sank all the way down and fired back up, her fingers twitching around her smoothie cup. She started to say something, but no words came out. That telling reaction caused Burgess todig his fingertips into his thigh hard enough to cause pain, his pulse pumping loudly in his ears.Name the dead man who hurt you.

His throat burned with the effort of keeping that inquiry to himself, because it would be too far. Too fast. He might have spent the last few months replaying the afternoon they’d spent together, but there was no reason to think she’d done the same. He was just a potential employer to her. Not a friend. Not someone to whom she’d be interested in spilling her guts.

Definitely not a romantic prospect.

“Maybe I could come to dinner,” she said slowly, as if measuring her words.

Burgess held his breath, a weird sensation—was it hope?—giving him pins and needles at the top of his scalp. Whoa. What was happening here? “Yeah?”

“Yes, I mean, I’ll stay in the hotel for now, of course, but I didn’t get a long enough visit with Lissa this morning and...” She cocked her head. “Are you picking up on the mean girl vibes?”

“I . . . what? What the hell is that?”

“Like maybe the girls at school aren’t being very kind to her.”

“Yeah.” Relief almost had his giant ass sliding off the chair. “You think so, too?”

She gave a reluctant nod.

He prodded at the discomfort in the chest. “Oh God, I don’t like knowing that. At all.”

Tallulah followed the motions of his hand, looking almost curious. “I don’t want to overstep—it’s probably a job for Mom. But as a former brownnosing science freak, Idohave some experience with mean girls.”

---