Page 7 of Don't Look Back

She nodded toward the door. “I need to drop the room key in my base sponsor’s cubicle, which is upstairs.”

He followed her through the door into the main corridor. As she locked the door, her flushed, happy face turned somber, reminding him they had serious ground to cover.

The hall was empty, so he launched right in. “I’m so sorry about your father.”

She gave a short nod as she tucked away the key and headed toward the staircase. Her gaze was on her feet as she said, “Thank you. I thought maybe you’d reach out before or after he died. I’ll admit, it hurt that you never replied to my email.”

“The one where you told me to leave you alone? Or the one that said your boyfriend wants me to stop emailing you?”

Her head snapped up. “What?”

He shrugged. “All I know is what I received.”

She resumed walking. When she reached the stairs, she climbed one, then turned to face him. The stair gave her a boost, and they stood eye to eye. “I don’t have a boyfriend. And why would I complain about emails I never received?”

The confusion on her face was genuine. He’d expected that. But there was no way he could have had this conversation with her months ago, when her father was gravely ill or very recently deceased.

“I emailed you a half dozen times in those first weeks, Kira.”

She shook her head. “Not possible.”

“I’ll show you my outbox if that’s what it takes. I don’t have my laptop on me, but my house is only twenty minutes outside the gate.”

Her gaze dropped to her shoes again. “I had a concussion. In December. My screen time was limited to medical consultations for the first ten days or so, but still, I’d have seen your emails later, when I was back online.”

“Someone must have deleted them.”

The same someone who sent me emails twice from your account.

He waited for her to make the connection. He couldn’t be the one to accuse her recently deceased father.

She closed her eyes. “There’s only one person who had access to my computer last winter.”

“I presume that person isn’t your boyfriend.”

She sighed. “As I said, no boyfriend. It had to be my father.”

He wanted to ask who Apollo was—when he’d received the email, her cryptic declaration when she’d been semiconscious had come to mind—but now wasn’t the time to pull the pin on that grenade.

One hot topic at a time.

“I figured as much when Freya told me about your dad’s illness. He made it clear at the hospital none of us were welcome. And later…”

“Later, when he was ill, he needed all my attention. Given that he died seven weeks after his stroke, it wasn’t too much to ask.”

He nodded. “I couldn’t…shit…I still feel awful for telling you this now. But Kira, I couldn’t let his lies make you hate me.”

Her gaze remained fixed on her feet. “I didn’t hate you.”

“You thought I ghosted you.”

She huffed out a sigh. “I was hurt. But that’s not hate.”

He placed a finger under her chin and raised her gaze to meet his. “And I hate that you were hurt. More than that, I needyou to know I wasn’t the one who did the hurting.”

Well, except for her seeing him with Staci, but that was yet another grenade to save for when they had more time.

As if she could read his mind, she looked at her watch. “I need to return this key and hit the road.”

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